Aittvax.198 net.news utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ittvax!swatt Tue Jan 19 19:39:55 1982 DECnet survey Okay, I'll try to keep the flames out, but I do have to mention in passing that Bill Shannon, Armando Stettner, and other folks at decvax are doing the rest of us a lot of important favors (and I don't mean just making USENET maps). DEC is paying their salaries to do work that makes a lot of UNIX users more comfortable on DEC equipment. Not to mention that "decvax" is one of the main store and forward nodes on USENET, or that they poll a lot of systems without autodialers, ... However, to the point, I suppose it depends on what you call "marketing". Yes, eventually, if DEC does do something about making DECnet compatible software available on UNIX, they will probably want to call it a product and charge money for it. But I think the survey is a valuable opportunity to give DEC another push towards full acceptance of UNIX (Sorry Bill, it's sitting in my active mail box and I mean to get around to it..). I personally am very interested in a UNIX-VMS network connection; we have two VAXen sitting 6 feet apart, and it looks like the only way to get mail between them is by routing through an IBM using 2780 emulation ... Not a few installations are in the same boat. If enough yeas will get DEC to do the necessary work, you should be grateful for the opportunity. Besides, we already have a USENET-ARPA gateway thanks to the kind folks at UCB and SRI and a few other places; a USENET-DECnet gateway would enrich both worlds. Keep in mind that 90+% of USENET users, even in commercial systems like decvax, are engineering, not marketing types. I am frankly surprised the DEC marketeers even let Bill send that survey out without first requiring all USENET subscribers to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Yes ARPA has rules about promotion and such, but I don't see how similar rules, even if USENET systems agreed to it (how many USENET users does it take ...), could be enforced on a system that picks up a substantial part of the overall phone tab. In any case, my policy on policies is to wait until something becomes a problem, rather than spend time debating issues that usually become moot. Even then, the worst I might suggest is to confine it to "net.hype". So in a legal sense, unless there are violations of phone regulations, whoever pays the bills on USENET can talk about whatever they want. In a philosophical sense, I see little difference between surveys to determine USENET polcies and practices and surveys to determine interest in possible new DEC software offerings. In fact, the former is "overhead", only justified insofar as the rest of the traffic is useful and informative, the latter is clearly both. - Alan S. Watt (decvax!ittvax!swatt) [ No, Bill didn't make me do it by threatening to cut off our UUCP connection, honest! ] ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.