Newsgroups: bit.listserv.lstsrv-l
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1992 00:42:40 +0100
From:         Eric Thomas <ERIC@SEARN.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: ... - battle of the LISTSERVs (?)
              22 Nov 1992 18:22:49 EST from "Forum on LISTSERV release 1.7"
              <LSTSRV-L@SEARN>

On Sun,  22 Nov  1992 18:22:49 EST  "A. Ralph  Papakhian" <PAPAKHI@IUBVM>
said:

>For what  it's worth,  I would agree  as well. I  also observe  that the
>Coalition for  Networked Information (CNI)  has now also  advertized its
>own "listserv" which  is (mostly) of the non-Eric Thomas  kind. So now a
>large number of individuals in that coaltion are equally confused by the
>meaning of "listserv."

I realize  I will  probably sound cynical,  but these  "ethical" problems
Michael and you have mentioned often look surprisingly like "under cover"
political stances.  Let's take the case  of RARE - a  european network of
which most  european countries  are a member.  While most  North American
users have  never heard  of RARE,  this is by  no means  because it  is a
small, or poor, network.  One reason RARE is not very  well known is that
it is OSI oriented,  and another is that it doesn't  really produce or do
much. RARE runs a  lot of projects and working groups,  some of which are
useful, some of which are not, it has issued the call for tenders for the
IXI  network, which  is almost  unanimously  considered as  a major  step
towards the  NON use of OSI  protocols by disenchanted users,  and that's
about it.

RARE  runs the  Tasos  server  for their  working  group  lists and  main
secretariat,  with limited  success.  Unfortunately, most  of the  people
involved  in these  groups have  heard enough  about me  to know  I wrote
LISTSERV, and  I had the  pleasure of  being informed that  "my" software
was,  to put  it nicely,  a piece  of cowdung  - not  that they  expected
anything else from something originally written for IBM machines.

Both as a user of their working-group  lists and as author of LISTSERV, I
would like  them to  either switch  to Mailbase or  let someone  else run
their lists on LISTSERV.  The other users of the lists  often ask for the
same. Some of  the working group chairs have announced  that they want to
move their lists to Mailbase on another host due to all the problems they
had with 'listserv'. The vice-president of  RARE asked to be removed from
all RARE mailing lists  until the problems are solved. Here  is a copy of
his letter:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 9 Sep 1992 07:54:33 +0200
From: Juergen Harms <harms@cui.unige.ch>
To: RARE Secretariate <raresec@rare.nl>
Cc: RARE Council of Admininstration <coa@rare.no>
Subject: "news" list
Autoforwarded: TRUE

Please remove my entry from all lists directly managed by RARE and send me
important information by fax or paper mail. I am ready to reconsider this
decision when the secretariate has made the proof that it knows how to
handle mailing lists, and in particular how to set the list up in a way
that non-delivery reports do not go to the entire list.

Juergen
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

So it seems we have a clear case: users want a change, some working group
chairs actually demand  a change, even top executives want  a change; the
EARN president  formally asked  RARE to  consider switching  to something
else, and I complained about end-user confusion and the fact that running
this  software  gives  the  impression that  RARE  passively  condones  a
delicate and ethically controversial attitude. Nothing happened.

RARE is a big  network. Being funded both by members and  by the EC, they
have quite a  lot of money. Their  budget is of several  millions of ECU,
whereas EARN's is in hundreds of thousands (1 ECU = 1.x dollar). RARE has
a secretariat, they have staff, they have computers, they haven't got any
financial  excuse  for  running a  second-class  electronic  conferencing
service for  their working groups,  which after all  are one of  the main
reasons RARE exists.

EARN and  RARE have  some kind  of formal  cooperative agreement,  in the
scope of which  RARE could legitimately ask EARN to  help them with their
mailing lists. I have myself offered to run up to 20 lists for them at no
cost, so  that they could see  the difference before deciding.  Thank you
for your kind offer, which shall be given due consideration in due time.

Well  you are  free to  draw  your own  conclusions,  and I  am sure  the
official line is  that RARE is working very hard  on solving the problems
people are  complaining about and  regrets the existence of  this ethical
issue but  cannot do much  about it, or  something similar. However  I am
left wondering  how such  a state  of affairs  can possibly  exist unless
there are decision makers within the organization who enjoy the idea that
they are  confusing (evil) EARN  users while  giving me a  bad reputation
with  the software  of  someone else.  In fact,  a  working group  member
suggested that, if  I would just start praising the  Tasos server and say
that Mailbase creates abominable problems to EARN users, it wouldn't take
long for RARE to switch to Mailbase :-)

Now, the most ridiculous thing is that this whole ethical debates centres
on  two pretty  simple  requirements: not  having  the software  identify
itself as  'unix listserv  version x.y' or  anything which  can otherwise
cause users to think  this is the same thing as the  VM LISTSERV, and not
having  ambiguous  statements  in  the documentation  like  "this  is  an
implementation of  the BITNET  LISTSERV for unix".  The programs  are not
compatible, they  don't share  the same protocols,  they haven't  got one
byte of source code in common, they are about as similar as unix and VMS,
calling the unix code an "implementation of the BITNET LISTSERV for unix"
is like saying unix is an  implementation of VMS for the SPARCstation. In
the  academic world  such considerations  are  taken for  granted, it  is
simply  part  of  the  tradition   of  scientific  research.  Sadly,  the
permeability  of certain  categories of  computer professionals  to their
environment being what it is, we  have reached a situation where a "gang"
of  such people  are taking  pleasure  in running  software which  causes
trouble  to users  whose  only crime  is to  visit  a different  software
church, or indeed most  of the time to visit no such  church at all, when
their higher management  (usually taken from the  academic culture) would
quickly prohibit them from running this  software if they only knew about
the ethical struggle. This in turn can give a bad reputation to the moral
principles  of  entire   organizations  when  only  a   small  number  of
individuals are concerned.

And I think I have now wasted enough time on this 'listserv'.

  Eric
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU