🚀 go-pugleaf

Edward Vielmetti writes:
>
>For my own part I would rather see the University of Michigan spend
>its attention on other public works projects and get out of the
>free UUCP feeds business, especially in the parts of the state
>where there are commercial providers and other free providers ready
>to go at the task.  Now that ITD has a big bill to pay back to the
>US Gov't for overcharging for MTS, it hardly makes any sense to me
>why they are giving away a service that's either a valuable service
>(in which case they should charge for it) or a worthless service
>(in which case they should stop doing it).  

Well, U-M is a big place, and IMHO it has enough attention for many, many
projects simultaneously.  In all honesty the marginal costs for what we
do in the UUCP biz is very low.  This is due to a couple of factors:

	o We have eliminated about 80% of the UUCP-based news feeds we
	  were giving out.  This means that the machine used for this
	  service does a lot less compressing and batching.

	o We don't poll anyone.  So we don't have any phone bills to
	  pay.

	o We don't really provide any kind of "customer support."  If you
	  don't know what you're doing, and your stuff backs up on our
	  machine, we'll cut you off.  We can't spend time handling this
	  kind of stuff.

The costs then are the marginal cost of doing some UUCP-based news and
allowing other sites to dial-in to get a tiny amount of mail.  Staff time
is only involved when setting up an account or eliminating one, and either
one of these involves very little time.  Since Wes does most of this, he's
the one to give the authoritative word.

To my mind we provide a different service than a place like MSEN.  You want
reliability, go to MSEN.  You want customer support, go to MSEN.  You want
prompt action, go to MSEN.  We are no-frills, but I think the service we
do provide is decent enough that it is still valuable.

We have gone around and around in circles on charging for this service.
The current thinking seems to be that the costs involved in the accounting
and billing would outweigh the costs in providing the service, and so
it isn't practicable.  

This is just my take on the issue; the view from the trenches, and should
not be taken as having come from anyone who actually gets to make decisions
or set policy or anything like that.
-- 
Bryan Beecher, U-M Information Technology Division (+1 313 747 4050)
Domain:	Bryan.Beecher@umich.edu      Path:  ..!uunet!destroyer!bryan