Commercial uses of the network

[utzoo!decvax!microsof!uw-beaver!cornell!vax135!floyd!whuxlb!eisx!npoiv!npois!cbosgd!mark]

Good grief.  What a lot of ado over nothing.  Aside from the obvious confusions
in the article between Usenet and "the UNIX network" and UUCP (I thought this
was straightened out at Unicom: there is no such thing as a Usenet address,
any more than getting the New York Times delivered at home implies that you
have a New York Times address) this is pretty silly.

There are an estimated 1500 UUCP nodes currently.  Probably 25% or so of them
are universities and nonprofit corporations, the rest are all companies with
a service or product to offer.  Should we make 3/4 of the net go away?

TWG was not proposing to have every bug report posted to net.eunice (although,
what with net.bugs, there is precedent for such an animal, I doubt many people
want to read all the routine bug reports that are likely to be submitted), all
they did was ask people to get in touch with them so that UUCP mail could be
established.  In other words, there will be some UUCP address that Eunice users
can use to send bug reports to.  Big deal.

Berkeley has an electronic address for bug reports: ucbvax!4bsd-bugs.  Western
Electric has an electronic address for System V bug reports: nwuxc!ucsmail
(I think - I can't find me card right now.)  Nobody got upset over that.

While Digital or any other site has the right to refuse to forward certain
kinds of mail, I really doubt that it's going to bother most of us to have
a convenient bug report mechanism.  Many sites will set up a direct connection,
but some sites will be unable to and will want to route it through others.
I think the UNIX community as a whole benefits from having software available
which is less buggy.
-- 
	Mark Horton