USENIX Board Studies UUCP

[Henry Spencer]

In article <192 at limbo.Intuitive.Com> taylor at limbo.Intuitive.Com (Dave Taylor) writes:
>Henry adds that he believes the problem with ACSNet not catching on 
>outside of Australia is that it cost money to obtain.  I think he's 
>off a bit on this, however, and he points out the problem I believe
>it had in the US... If your neighbors are running ACSNet, you have to be
>running it also.  Just like UUCP.  Basically, then, you can't successfully 
>run a site that has ACSNet on some lines and UUCP on others without 
>much difficulty and parallel administration.

Parallel administration is neither difficult nor new; lots of sites run
with both UUCP and TCP/IP, for example.  Many people hereabouts were quite
interested in the idea of talking ACSNet to capable sites, while inevitably
retaining UUCP to talk to backward parts of the world.  The licence and
the price tag killed that idea dead, however.  Getting other ACSNet sites
to talk to would not have been difficult if the software had been free;
we could all see the technical advantages.  But having to pay for it 
makes the chicken-and-egg problem *much* worse, because the cost and
paperwork of the software have to be justified, and it is difficult to
justify being the first site in the neighborhood to spend the money.
Or the second, or the third.  Especially when UUCP is free, and almost as
good for the most important purposes.  ACSNet succeeds in Australia mostly
because it has a de-facto monopoly.  Elsewhere, *nobody* runs it.

I would say that there is virtually no market for a UUCP lookalike that
provides only modest advantages but costs a substantial amount of money.
It would have to be a *lot* better.  That's difficult; UUCP does ship
data around pretty well.  Its administrative headaches are serious for
small sites run by naive users, but a controllable nuisance to bigger
sites with experienced personnel.  If the new software is to be really
widely adopted, the cost/benefit ratio has to be really favorable for
almost everyone.  Either it has to provide major benefits to just
about everyone or it has to have very low cost.  Preferably the latter,
given the number of sites with zero networking budget.  UUCP has been a
roaring success partly because it requires *no* explicit investment --
the software comes with Unix and most sites already have modems for other
reasons.

Much depends on the objective of the effort.  If it is to provide a
more-easily-administered version of UUCP for a substantial niche market --
e.g. the folks who can afford money for software but don't want to learn
to do UUCP sysadmin work -- then a serious pricetag is okay.  However,
then it has to be compatible over the phone lines, and major extra
functionality won't be much use unless it also gets added to UUCP, because
those niche-market sites talk to bigger sites much more than they talk to
each other.  If the objective is to provide something decisively superior
to UUCP that everybody will use, it has to be free or cost almost nothing.

I suggest that Usenix ought to be aiming for the second, not the first,
objective.  The pricey niche-market UUCP lookalike is just the sort of
thing that a commercial firm could pursue profitably, and indeed the UUNET
folks have expressed interest in the idea.  Usenix should be looking at
doing things that other people *won't* do.
-- 
A bit of tolerance is worth a  |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
megabyte of flaming.           | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry at zoo.toronto.edu