Stargate, costs, and alternative services

[Henry Spencer]

> ... If you expect people to actively support this
> effort then they must be better informed than what has happened for the
> last year -- PARTICULARLY if you plan to place trial service into effect
> starting in January. Getting information AFTER THE FACT is useless!!!!!

If active support is irrelevant at this stage, why should Stargate go out
of its way to solicit it?  I would assume that when they want, e.g.,
participants for the January trials, they will say so.  Doing everything
in the glare of publicity is a sure way to kill a project.  In case you
don't remember, Usenix itself was formed as a fait accompli.  The folks
who did it got up and said "since everyone agrees that the Users' Group
needs to be on a better legal footing, we have formed the Usenix Association,
bylaws and fees are thus-and-such, please feel free to join".  There was
some grumbling at the time about why everybody and his dog wasn't consulted,
to which the basic answer (as I recall) was "we didn't need everybody and
his dog to get things started, and we wanted to get things done rather
than talking about it endlessly".  Personally, I feel that the resulting
group certainly did not suffer for being created this way, and probably
benefitted from it.  Stargate, like Usenix, is not being crammed down our
throats at gunpoint.  We can always ignore it if it's dreadful.  Why
not wait and see?

> ... I will not accept having an undiscussed Stargate implemented defacto...

Why?  It's not as if you were investing in it.  If the people involved
with Stargate think they can come up with something good, I'm perfectly
happy to let them try.  When and if it emerges, I will then decide whether
I like it enough to participate in it.  Did the people who built your
machine consult you in its construction?  Did the people who designed the
chips that went into it consult you?  Where are your cries of outrage
over *their* presumptuous actions?  Why the double standard?
-- 
EDEC:  Stupidly non-standard
brain-damaged incompatible	Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
proprietary protocol used.	{allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry