🚀 go-pugleaf

William P. Gardner asks:
> To my knowledge, none of the academic nets allow commerce in documents 
> (or anything else).  Does anyone know of an official statement of policy 
> from the BITNET people or from USENET (who runs USENET, anyway?) that 
> states and justifies this policy?

The original statement of non-commercial use came from ARPA, the
Department of Defense, Advanced Project Research Admin., you might be
able to find the precise wording from the Network Information Center,
the NIC at SRI.  Basically public money (but military) can't be used for
commercial purposes.  Every now and again a General might log in an send
a message out to that effect.

The BITNET "policy" was stated in 1981, I think, in Ira Fuchs' original
article on the BITNET (Because It's Time Net).  They very quickly shot
themselves in the foot because they discovered they left out Government
agencies, and useful commercial entities.  SPAN and HEPnet had these
problems, too.

CSnet was somewhat aware of the need for commercial entities (members),
but the problem was that only big companies could afford it.

WHO runs USENET??  I feel like a Mexican bandito when you say that, you
don't happened to be named Fred C.  Dobbs by chance?  "Badges?  We got
no stinkin' badges..."  No one runs USENET (a loose confederation of
people.  It's chaos.  It's mostly honor system.  Hacker ethics.
Personal advancement info gets groups like comp.newprod, biz.*, the
*wanted* groups, certain soc.singles types groups.  Not every site gets
these.  A few sites refuse the soc/talk/rec/misc/alt groups.  The line
is somewhat fuzzy and few want to push it.  Some look the other way, a
few fundamentalists see things differently.  So it's kind of a scale:
pyramid schemes will get thrown out fast, paid seminars on computer
literacy might be tolerated, and free seminars more so.

e.  nobuo miya