Asii.122
net.general
utzoo!decvax!ittvax!sii!wje
Tue May  4 09:52:28 1982
Commercial News
Some time ago, SII sent out a product update notice and asked what people
thought about such things. The responses have been collected and run
4 to 1 in favor of commercial notices being available, as long as they
are not intended to be pure sales hype. (OUR widget is better than
THEIR widget because they are jerks.. )

The objections were not because of inherent bias against commercial
information, but rather because of:

1) Questions about how commercial traffic affects holders of educational
  licenses.

  I wouldn't think that there would be any problem, any comments?

2) Having disinterested sites pay for the messages to be passed around.

  Given the vast quantities of junk that goes over the net, our site
  would be more than happy to see useful information available,
  such as more technical info, notices of new research papers, new
  Unix products, etc. In any case, most of the users of our product
  are on the net, consisting primarily of Bell, Western, and ATT sites,
  along with some major university sites.

There was a comment that the majority of Usenet sites are educational
institutions. I suspect that this is probably not the case, assuming
that one doesn't count Bell sites as educational. Decvax certainly
isn't, and is a major supporter of the network. Has anyone actually
made a count? That would be an interesting bit of information.

Mark Horton suggested a 'net.commercial' news group, which I think is
a great idea, not because we have a lot of products to sell (we don't),
but because it would be nice to know what's available. How about it?

                       -Bill Ezell
                       Software Innovations, Inc.
                       (ittvax!sii!wje)
                       (decvax!sii!wje)
                       (harpo!sii!wje)

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