From: peterd@bunyip.com (Peter Deutsch)
Subject: Paying for the net (was: Re: Zen and the Art of the Internet)
Organization: McGill University
Distribution: na
Date: Wed, 22 Jul 1992 23:17:27 GMT

In article <BrGvxz.Iw0@acsu.buffalo.edu> xnswfft@ubvmsb.cc.buffalo.edu  
(WFFT Radio, Buffalo's Modern Rock Radio) writes:
> In article <1992Jul13.224402.27834@sifon.cc.mcgill.ca>,  
peterd@cc.mcgill.ca (Peter Deutsch) writes...
  .  .

> How about applying for a grant?  How do you think Gnu exists?
> 
> I am all for Brendan making $ but I thought uit shallow of you not to  
think of 
> the obvious.

Shallow!?!? How dare you call me shallow!?!? Those who have seen
me tend to describe me as wide, if not deep... :-)

Actually, I have looked into the possibility of grants to keep
archie alive, and it is not as easy as it sounds. First, most
funding agencies currently paying for the Internet (notably
NSF) have a policy against funding operational services. They _will_
accept unsolicited proposals for _research_ but running archie
takes a $20,000 machine and part of a body and we need half a dozen
for each distinct database. Since we want to bring up another
half a dozen new databases (yellow pages, on-line library catalogues,
email mailing lists, etc etc etc) we're talking a sizable capital
investment, even before we discuss operational issues. I have
asked my university, my regional and my national net for funds and was
turned down. I hope we can get some money from NSF for research,
and if you know someone giving out money for good works, please
give them my name, since I think archie is a "good thing" and I'd
love to not have to charge for it.

Of course, granting agencies also want some kind of track record. We're 
apparently okay, since archie has been alive now for a while, but 
Brendan is a ugrad in Pennsylvania. Finding money for people like that 
(who are just as likely to have a good, useful idea as some professor
at a Big 10 school, in my experience) is more iffy. The free market has
traditionally been more willing to reward the good idea than a
bureaucracy and I like the efficiency of this...

Another problem is what I call "death by success". When archie took
off I keep getting asked about what I was going to do to reduce
traffic (at one point the McGill archie machine was receiving half
of all packets into Montreal!). Now, if we lived in a world where we
generated income in proportion to our traffic, I'm sure no one would
have objected, but since that was fixed bandwidth, the Quebec
regional network basically said "fix it or turn it off". Fortunately,
we'd lined up additional servers, but it was a close thing. Isn't it
a little crazy when fixed grant funding leads us to trim traffic like
this? I don't hear the phone company complaining when people use
the phone a lot, because they know those using the resources are the
ones paying for them.

If you know people funding such things who are _not_ venture 
capitalists, please send me addresses. I'd love to talk to them. Of 
course, it limits the number of new services to what can be funded by 
granting agencies, and it does so basically, it seems, so that the 
end-user is not responsible for the cost of what they are doing. This
doesn't sound like a sound model to me.

Of course, I'd be happy to keep working on Internet services without  
charging people for what I do. Unfortunately, I haven't found the 
funding agency that will enable me to do that yet, and I've tried 
(maybe the Macarthur Foundation people would like to give _me_ 100k? 
:-)


				- peterd
Newsgroups: alt.internet.services