Douglas, I don't want to start a flame war or anything, but your facts just aren't correct. I developed LISTSERV in 1986 under the aegis of a university for which I provided free system management services in return. So, I worked there without pay, and in exchange, they let me use their IBM mainframe and keep ownership of anything I might develop. This was a common arrangement in Europe at the time, although since then universities have begun to realize that, sometimes, these students develop very valuable things and it is such a pity that the university doesn't get a share of the profits. But back then, the thought that I might develop anything of value was so remote that it wasn't considered by either party. Either way, I didn't get my computer time for free; I had to work for it. You couldn't get LISTSERV unless you were connected to BITNET/EARN and had an IBM mainframe. Unfortunately, this doesn't equate to any kind of patronage from any of these organizations. I did not receive funding, a computer, or anything like that. I did receive encouragements, thank you letters and the like, but you cannot pay the rent with that. I had to work, like everyone else, for what I had. EARN's only real contribution to LISTSERV is that they purchased licenses in bulk in 1993, for which I was and still am very grateful, but by then LISTSERV was already 7 years old. IBM generously invited me to meet senior developers that customers normally have no access to, and I think they even paid for one of these trips, although I no longer remember for sure. BITNET (which by then was called CREN) tried to put me out of business because, aahhh let's not get into that old stuff. It's very difficult to understand if you weren't there at the time. Grateful as I am for these contributions, they are at best meagre. The French government made a far bigger contribution by footing the bill for my studies. I got to attend one of the top universities in Europe for free, although in reality that was funded by the taxes my parents paid all their life. Nevertheless, I think there is a stronger case for saying that French laws should apply to LISTSERV usage today than for expecting the product to have to follow rules that BITNET, EARN or IBM had in the 80s. Most of the LISTSERV backbone is academic sites, but rest assured that your average commercial customer doesn't want its distributions to touch the backbone. In a typical commercial scenario, money is lost if the message isn't delivered, and the last thing you want is to hear that an outage somewhere in an organization you have never even heard of is the reason you might be losing your job today after your scheduled chat with an angry VP. The backbone is used for lists such as this one, primarily by universities. In the 80s or early 90s, when the backbone carried almost all the traffic and was implemented with mainframes costing eight figures, there was a clear economic aspect to the backbone, but at the time there was no commercial usage on the network because there were no commercial users. Today there is, in most cases, no actual cost for what is left of the backbone, because it uses a couple percent of a four-figure server that you needed to buy anyway. I am sure there are exceptions here and there, for instance the central node at L-Soft is a server that we would probably not have needed otherwise, and there may be sites with older hardware where the backbone takes much more than a couple percent. As far as I can see, the only L-Soft award that went to a commercial list is the one for e-mail marketing, which is a given. Technically, quite a few universities do e-mail marketing nowadays, but you can rest assured that they wouldn't want to come near an "e-mail marketing award" :-) Likewise, the Educational award was guaranteed to go to an academic site, and the rest were open. But the other awards ended up going to a variety of non-profit lists, many of them hosted by universities. I wasn't on the jury (in exchange, I get to pick the Grand Winner in a couple weeks), but I heard that there were far more applications from academic sites, which makes sense given the respective cultures of business and academia. Universities also have to accept that others will review their research and other projects, whereas corporate lawyers are not necessarily as excited at the prospect that a third party will make public statements about them. The awards are not about "list ownership" per se, and we did not even attempt to evaluate the skills of the list owner, at least not the skills that I think you are thinking of. We would have had to subscribe to the lists, start a couple flame wars, simulate broken mail clients and the like. It could have been fun mind you, but I doubt the list owners would have appreciated our efforts ;-) Although the list owner obviously plays a central role, and bearing in mind again that I was not on the jury, I think what we looked at is the big picture. The list members and editors probably played as big a role as the list owners in the final outcome. We awarded lists, not list owners. I am sorry that you never got your T-shirt. If you e-mail me your address (privately), I'll see if we still have any left - I think we still do in some sizes, and since you don't plan on ever wearing it, any size should do. Tell you what, to make up for the lost T-shirtless years, I'll have it delivered in a dedicated frame if I find a small enough size, with the plain (no logo) side of the shirt up, so you can hang it on a wall. No other list owner will have a plain black T-shirt inexplicably framed in his living room with the text "In memoriam flammarum" underneath. A definite conversation piece and, who knows, perhaps a valuable collector's item in 10 years or so? Eric