🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <WORLEY.91Jun21102706@sn1987a.compass.com> worley@compass.com (Dale Worley) writes:

   Up until now, The Net has been like the Hippie Movement.  We get a
   great playground, while businesses and the government pay for it.  The
   trouble is that The Net is not just a plaything anymore.  If we want
   to have it become an "information infrastructure" for the country,
   it's got to grow much, much larger than it is now, and it won't be
   able to live as a parasite.  It's got to go commercial, and that means
   that people are going to have to pay for their usage.

You mean we don't pay for it now?  Does that mean somehow we're not paying
$20,000/year to NYSERNet?

Ahhhh, you mean pay-per-usage.

set Pontification-mode=on

    When a shared resource is not being overused, flat rates work fine.
    People prefer flat rates.  When that resource becomes scarce,
    either the flat rate must rise to increase the resource, or
    pay-per-usage becomes necessary.  The timing of the transition
    from flat rates to pay-per-usage is difficult.

    Whole books have been written to explain the previous paragraph, so I
    don't expect you to absorb it all at once.

set Pontification-mode=off

Now, when you decry those who think information should be free, you
are partly saying that you don't like flat rates.  That's fine, but I
think you'll find yourself in the minority.

--
--russ <nelson@clutx.clarkson.edu> I'm proud to be a humble Quaker.
I am leaving the employ of Clarkson as of June 30.  Hopefully this email
address will remain.  If it doesn't, use nelson@gnu.ai.mit.edu.

worley@compass.com (Dale Worley) writes:

>Up until now, The Net has been like the Hippie Movement.  We get a
>great playground, while businesses and the government pay for it.  The
>trouble is that The Net is not just a plaything anymore.  If we want
>to have it become an "information infrastructure" for the country,
>it's got to grow much, much larger than it is now, and it won't be
>able to live as a parasite.  It's got to go commercial, and that means
>that people are going to have to pay for their usage.

well, not really commercial, but it must become self-financing.
i received quite some flames when i started selling free software
on tapes to finance my archive, but that's the way to go for
individual's projects, since one won't get enough donations.

keeping the net (news & mail) going, however, is surprisingly
cheap if enough individuals get organized: i now pay ~$14 for a
full news feed and mail plus local phone call charges.
through a sort-of semi-commercial thing a 64Kbit isdn
line to the german backbone will be installed soon.
several project like that are currently active in germany
and are in the process of conglomerating into a whole
organizational unit. not bad for a bunch of (mostly) private
people, eh?
-- 
   Heiko Blume <-+-> src@scuzzy.in-berlin.de <-+-> (+49 30) 691 88 93 [voice!]
                  public UNIX source archive [HST V.42bis]:
        scuzzy Any ACU,f 38400 6919520 gin:--gin: nuucp sword: nuucp
                     uucp scuzzy!/src/README /your/home

In article <NELSON.91Jun21110142@sun.clarkson.edu> nelson@sun.soe.clarkson.edu (Russ Nelson) writes:
   You mean we don't pay for it now?  Does that mean somehow we're not paying
   $20,000/year to NYSERNet?

Well, you are probably paying $20,000/yr, but that probably doesn't
cover the fraction of the backbone that you're using.  What is the
total budget of the backbone?

   Ahhhh, you mean pay-per-usage.

Not necessarily.

       Whole books have been written to explain the previous paragraph, so I
       don't expect you to absorb it all at once.

I'm glad to know that you think so highly of me.  In fact, the point
you make is pretty obvious and is referred to in about a thousand
articles in the popular press on such topics as air pollution,
land-use management, and transportation policy.

   Now, when you decry those who think information should be free, you
   are partly saying that you don't like flat rates.  That's fine, but I
   think you'll find yourself in the minority.

Well, as far as flat rates go, I seem to remember that the Internet is
perennially plagued by over-utilization.  Or perhaps the most recent
upgrade to the backbone capacity (paid for by NSF) has solved that
problem for all times...

On a more subtle level, flat rates have an interesting effect -- they
price small users out of the market.  For instance Clarkson can afford
$20k/yr for network access, but my company can't, because it only has
50 employees.  (See "barriers to entry" in your Econ book.)

--------------------

Unfortunatly, you're missing my central point.  (Although that may be
because I didn't explain myself well.)  The question isn't the payment
for *communication capacity* but payment for *information*.  The
expensive part about comp.archives is not *distributing* the
information in it, it is *creating* that information.  And while
technology will make the distribution ever cheaper, the creation will
never become cheaper (relative to the average person's income).

We need to start considering how to efficiently pay people for
creating information, if we're going to have increasing amounts of
useful information created.  Fortunately, we have certain
possibilities available to us that have not been available to people
before.  For instance, in many businesses, the costs of advertising
and billing consume a large fraction of the customer's dollar, leaving
very little money to pay for the creation of the product the customer
wants.  This is inefficient, in the economic sense -- the customer
pays far more for the product than the producer demands to produce it.

With an electronic network, it is possible that the process of billing
could be 100% automated.  (For instance, each query to the database
charges your credit card 1 cent.)  If the infrastructure of billing
for small transactions were well-developed, it is possible that 90%+
of the customer's dollar could go to the producer.

An example of how this works is the long-distance telephone business,
where calls are remarkably cheap, even though they are billed
individually, but ATT, MCI, and Sprint are making serious bucks
anyway...

Dale

Dale Worley		Compass, Inc.			worley@compass.com
--
Q: Why does Internet raise issues of academic freedom and free
speech?
A:  Anything you can write publish, broadcast, or yell from the
top of a building, Internet can propagate further, faster, more
elegantly.  Thus, age-old issues of freedom of speech and
expression vs. public safety and moral sensibilities have moved
into this high tech arena.	-- Joe Abernathy
[And in an intensified form.]

In article <WORLEY.91Jun21102706@sn1987a.compass.com> worley@compass.com (Dale Worley) writes:
> Witness the FSF/LPF crowd...

Watch it. There are lots of us who detest the GPV shenanigans but are in
complete agreement with the LPF. Don't paint with too broad a brush, or
you'll alienate many folks who would otherwise agree with you.

Like me.
-- 
Peter da Silva; Ferranti International Controls Corporation; +1 713 274 5180;
Sugar Land, TX  77487-5012;         `-_-' "Have you hugged your wolf, today?"

In article <BR5CC=G@xds13.ferranti.com> peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
   > Witness the FSF/LPF crowd...

   Watch it. There are lots of us who detest the GPV shenanigans but are in
   complete agreement with the LPF. Don't paint with too broad a brush, or
   you'll alienate many folks who would otherwise agree with you.

First, what's "GPV"?

Well, from where I sit (Boston, the epicenter of Gnu-ism), the
activists in FSF seem to be the same as the activists in LPF, i.e.,
old wine in new bottles.  Maybe there are people who support the LPF's
objections to certain aspects of the current intellectual property
laws but aren't against intellectual property entirely.  But I've
never heard one speak!  (Until now.)

That's what makes me extremely leery of supporting LPF, even though I
agree with some of its causes -- I don't want to advance Stallman's
software socialism, which I consider much more dangerous than user
interface copyrights.

Dale

In article <WORLEY.91Jun26105721@sn1987a.compass.com> worley@compass.com 
(Dale Worley) writes:
[...]
>Well, from where I sit (Boston, the epicenter of Gnu-ism), the
>activists in FSF seem to be the same as the activists in LPF, i.e.,
>old wine in new bottles.  Maybe there are people who support the LPF's
>objections to certain aspects of the current intellectual property
>laws but aren't against intellectual property entirely.  But I've
>never heard one speak!  (Until now.)

Don't know what this has to do with comp.archives.admin, nor why I was
just reading this group, but there are plenty of LPF'ers who are not at
all in the FSF camp. Witness Richard Gabriel, technical director of
Lucid, Inc. (A Common LISP house; Sun Common LISP is really Lucid),
Guy Steele of Thinking Machines (author of _Common LISP, the Language_ and
a central designer of Common LISP), and Patrick Henry Winston, Director
of the MIT AI Lab (but also an author of the proprietary San Marco
LISP Explorer that Gold Hill markets). Also, I think the new LPF president
is a very well-known "mainstream" software guy, with long ties to the
Defense industry and other things that FSF wouldn't like.

						- Marty
------------------------------------------------------
hall@aplcen.apl.jhu.edu, hall%aplcen@jhunix.bitnet, ..uunet!aplcen!hall
(setf (need-p 'disclaimer) NIL)

In article <1991Jun26.171330.3590@aplcen.apl.jhu.edu>, hall@aplcen.apl.jhu.edu (Marty Hall) writes:
>  Also, I think the new LPF president
> is a very well-known "mainstream" software guy, with long ties to the
> Defense industry and other things that FSF wouldn't like.

Sounds like you are trying to paint FSF people as your typical left-leaning
america-last kind of guys. 

What do you base that on?

Given what I know of RMS's work on defense-industry funded projects I very
much doubt that any anti-defense-industry posture in FSF, if it exists at
all, would be influenced from the top-down.

>In article <1991Jun26.171330.3590@aplcen.apl.jhu.edu>, hall@aplcen.apl.jhu.edu (Marty Hall) writes:
[LPF members with ties to the commercial software business] ...
>>  Also, I think the new LPF president
>> is a very well-known "mainstream" software guy, with long ties to the
>> Defense industry and other things that FSF wouldn't like.
>
>Sounds like you are trying to paint FSF people as your typical left-leaning
>america-last kind of guys. [...]

Again, this doesn't really belong in comp.archives.admin, so this is my
last comment :-)

Sorry if I gave that impression. I was responding to a poster who was
opposed to much of the FSF position, and then said, more or less, "isn't
LPF the same?"

Most of my posting was trying to show that the LPF had ties to the "proprietary
software" folks. I did not intend that last sentence as being inflammatory
or anti-FSF; the whole post was trying to say that the LPF was quite distinct
from FSF. I was trying to show differences between LPF and the real or
assumed positions of FSF and its more visible members. I absolutely intended
no indictment of FSF!

						- Marty
------------------------------------------------------
hall@aplcen.apl.jhu.edu, hall%aplcen@jhunix.bitnet, ..uunet!aplcen!hall
Artificial Intelligence Lab, AAI Corp, PO Box 126, Hunt Valley, MD 21030

(setf (need-p 'disclaimer) NIL)