From: ForthNet@willett.pgh.pa.us (ForthNet articles from GEnie)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Feedback to the Forth Interest Group
Date: 8 Apr 92 12:33:45 GMT
Organization: (n.) to be organized.  But that's not important right now.

Category 1,  Topic 2
Message 160       Mon Mar 30, 1992
D.RUFFER [Dennis]            at 01:39 EST
 
A few more notes on the "roll your own BB approach":

1) maintaining a system to handle this cost money.  Money that, as Jack Woehr
has pointed out, FIG does not have.  Not only do the sysops die with age, but
so does the hardware.  Note especially the loss of almost all of the "X Forth
Boards".  They take energy and dollars to maintain.  On GEnie, not only do we
not have to pay to maintain hardware, but we receive royalties for the service
that we provide to their users.

2) speaking of money, how would we maintain the collections department for
such an operation?  Someone's got to pay for the system usage.  Who's going to
collect that money?  I realize that many of you who are using Usenet are not
paying for your connection (i.e. your company or university provides the
service to you for less than cost).  However, reality is that someone _is_
paying for it.  If FIG were running its own service, how much extra would it
cost to even collect the usage fees?

3) on running something out of FIG's "office".  Although we try very hard to
maintain the impression that a FIG office does exist, in reality it actually
does not.  The company that is currently handling our business affairs is
being paid to do so.  Every additional thing that we ask them to do costs FIG
more.  Besides the cost, they are not neccesarily technically inclined.  IMHO,
running a BB system is a little beyond their technical capabilities.  Sure we
could find another organization to do this for us, or even attempt to do it
ourselves.  However, does the cost outweight the benefits?  I participated in
this assesment back when we opened this RoundTable on GEnie, and I honestly
have not seen any change that would sway my decision today.

4) another factor is network availablity.  Again this comes down to a cost
consideration, since for a price, you can join every network that is in
existance.  However, we again would be relying on someone else for the
delivery of our service to our users and in this case we would have to handle
the complaints ourselves.  Instead, we are not only connected to _the_ largest
privatly held network in the world, but we also are networked to to whoever
else wants to connect to the ForthNet.

I'm really at a loss understanding what people are complaining about.  We
currently have about the best situation we could have ever hoped for.  Our
main ForthNet "hub" doesn't cost us a dime to maintain and even pays us to run
it.  Because of our choice to use GEnie, we are able to connect to whatever
network want's to carry us without being concerned about copyright issues
(Compuserve would never allow us to do this, for example).  So what is the
complaint?

I understand the boycott against GE, and I sympathize with those who are
trying to maintain their "purity".  However, we should all be allowed to have
our own beliefs and I personally do not share the opinion that GE is any worse
than any of the other large corporations that run this country.  I most
certainly respect those of you who do hold this opinion, but please respect my
choice also. I do not ask you to join GEnie if you do not want to, but I will
make it as easy as possible for those who want to.  The ForthNet is dedicated
to have as much coverage as is physically possible.

What more do you want?   {B-{)>   DaR
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