On Fri, 24 Feb 1995, Patrick Douglas Crispen wrote:
 
> On Thu, 23 Feb 1995 20:40:23 PST Dave Gomberg said:
> >Hey, Racine, I offered lists at $1 per member per month and if you are
> >serious you will contact me.  But reading your mail you probably won't.
>
> Hmmm ... $1 a subscriber ...  81,000 subscribers in my four workshops ...
>
> ... I LIKE IT <<laugh>> :)
 
  Obviously, this is a case of the buyer be ware, and people would
request services from a more reasonable site offering services for
a fee. For a small membership list, one could do buisness in good faith
with the charge of $1.00 per subscriber per month...but for very large lists
one might want to go with a service that is based on a charge of disk
space for archives required....resulting in a fee that might be payed
not by subscribers but by the owners....or the site...and spread across
the number of lists + disk space.  Let me also say that charging is not
'evil' (;-))....but perhaps a reality of the times.  There are all kinds
of fee structures, and I know 2 years ago I sent $10.00 Us to a listserv
list-owner (mednews) for the purchase of equipment needed to make the
list function more effectively...so one-time fees are not so new.
Granted the $$ sent from subscribers to David Dodell (mednews) were
probably based on how well they knew him and his ethics of list
management, and hense may be different from issues discussed here.
 
On the other hand, one can legitimately argue that $1 per subscriber is
cheap, irrelevant if there are 40 subscribers or 10,000....but depending
upon the list, I can see a decentralization of list topics in this
scenario.  That is to say, I will subscribe to the joke-l list at site
A because their only charge is for disk space, whereas the joke-l list
at site B charges $xx regardless of the number of subscribers or disk
space required.  Do we care about decentralization in this respect....
I don't know....can I peer the two and what will it cost me?  Is this
an issue?  Does anyone lose if I can't afford to peer A with B?  Does
anyone care?  Does it mean anything if I offer the same list for cheaper
than another site on the same topic?  Who wins ...or perhaps the question
is what is lost?  Granted I'm coming from an acadenic perspective where
much could be lost in terms of information.  What are the other implications?
 
My thoughts for whatever they are worth.
 
--Trish
---
Trish Forrest
Computing Services