From: nik@nik.b30.ingr.com (Nik Simpson)
Subject: Re: your mail
Organization: Mail news gateway
Distribution: world
Keywords: 
Reply-To: alt-sys-intergraph@ingr.com
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 1993 08:54:01 CST

>>
>>
>>First of all, an introduction.  I am Jim Kanya and I am the Vice Chairman
>>of the System Operations SIG for IGUG (formerly the Unix SIG).
>>
>>In article <C0JM72.op@nik.b30.ingr.com>, nik@nik.b30.ingr.com (Nik Simpson) writes:
>>> 	I believe the reason we do not offer an ftp site for Intergraph
>>> customers are:
>>
>>We have had many discussions about this in the past and Intergraph has
>>refused to be the FTP site.  Their reasons were stated by Nik and I
>>tend to agree with the reasons.  We thought we found a customer willing to
>>be an FTP site at last spring's IGUG, but it never panned out.
>>
>I think too much is being made of this. A firewalled anon ftp site is
>pretty trivial to set up. You might ask why I dont volunteer then ?

You have to remember that you are not dealing with a technical issue,
although maintaining a firewall is not as trivial as you would like to
believe. Intergraph has very good reasons for only allowing outgoing traffic
except for News and Mail.

>Two reasons
>1- I think this is something that ingr should provide. It is a selling point
>for them.

Frankly I doubt that it would be much of a selling point. If it
was so important to government and other net connected customers
we would start seeing it as a mandatory requirement for business.
I see alot of proposal requests, none have ever mentioned the need
for a PD software ftp site. In short, it would be nice to have one
but I don't think you can make a business case for it.
>
>The reason that not many people will use it seems a trifle lame. With all
>government,DOT's, defense contractors that Intergraph sells to on the internet
>"If you build it they will come".

Possibly, but I have my doubts, depends a bit on what sort of
software etc. customers would make available, what did you have in mind.

>How many customers even know there is
>an alt.sys.intergraph ? Also many commercial sites I know of dont even carry
>alt news groups. BTW is this alt newsgroup freely available at ingr ?
>
I try to publicize its existence as much as possible. I agree that
the alt hierarchy is not the best place for it, if someone wants to start
a vot on creating a comp.sys.intergraph I would be delighted. I haven't
done so myself for two reasons:

1) The traffic in this group is low, about 250 messages in the last
year. However on looking at the comp hierarchy there aer many
groups with lower turnover.

2) I think the CFV would be better coming from a customer rather
than Intergraph itself.

>Selling PD CD's doesn't hack it at all. Turn arounds in getting patches, bug
>fixes, new versions, exchanging trivial software all get interminably dragged
>out, as well as is being a more expensive option.
>
I totally disagree here, since the idea would be to make software
available to as many customers as possible. Net access must not be a
requirement.  CD as a distribution media is ideal, it is cheap to produce
and simple to distribute.

--
|----------------------------------------------------------------|
| Nik Simpson        Mail  :      nik@ingr.ingr.com 	           |
| Systems Software Consultant.    Intergraph Corporation         |
| In life a foolish prating knave				   |
|----------------------------------------------------------------|
Newsgroups: alt.sys.intergraph