At 12:12 PM -0500 1/31/1997, Rich Kulawiec wrote:
>Brad Knowles writes:
>> Check the comp.mail.sendmail FAQ. That wouldn't get written
>>without their support.
>
>While I find the comp.mail.sendmail FAQ eminently useful, and am very
>glad that it exists, there's no doubt in my mind that it would exist
>even if AOL never had. It's too necessary not to.
See my previous comments. I guarantee you that it would have
died on the vine. There simply was zero interest in keeping the
thing up to date, until I took the thing over. Were I to let it go
now, it probably would survive, but not if I'd done so back then.
>I know, I see them. But it's my impression that some/many of those
>resources, such as the list you mentioned about SGML, are provided
>by people who happen to be at AOL, not by AOL.
AOL pays for the hardware, including the power, space, cooling,
etc.... AOL pays the paychecks of its employees, and some of us tend
to be pretty activist towards certain types of things, and that's
part of why we were hired, and that is officially considered part (or
all) of our job while at AOL. It's part of my official job
description, if nothing else.
I'd say that this qualifies as AOL providing the resources.
Ultimately, everything is done by people, of course -- people wrote
Unix, people wrote the HTML spec, people wrote programs to be used by
other people to do things like surf the 'net. Ultimately, everything
is done by people, directly or indirectly.
What you have to look at is who is paying them, do they do this
kind of thing on company time, was it part of the reason they got
hired? If the answers to all those questions are "Yes", then it
seems to me that the company is providing the resources through the
people it has chosen to hire and the work it expects them to do.
>For example, not implementing poorly-thought-out mail filtering
>or screwing up HTTP 1.1 support would be a good start [see attached ASCII
>document] and respecting work done by non-AOLers (meaning leaving
>copyrighted work intact including all attributions, so that it's easily
>distinguishable from AOL's own work) would be nice.
The mail filtering I can address -- this issue is being forwarded
to our developers. The HTTP support I can't, especially since we're
integrating commercial software to provide the web browser function.
That would have to be directed at the people who implement the web
browser we are integrating.
As for respecting copyrighted work, I'm not aware of the specific
instances which you mention. As a FAQ maintainer myself, I can
guarantee you that I would be quite upset if someone did something
like that to me, and I can also assure you that if anyone at AOL is
doing something like this, I am not the only person who would be very
upset, and we would all work to get this offender recalibrated. Give
me details, and I'll knock down doors (no matter who they belong to).
--
Brad Knowles, MIME/PGP: brad@his.com
comp.mail.sendmail FAQ Maintainer <http://www.his.com/~brad/>
finger brad@his.com for my PGP Public Keys and Geek Code
The comp.mail.sendmail FAQ is at <http://www.his.com/~brad/sendmail/>
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