On Mon, 15 Jun 1998 17:35:40 -0700 Chuq Von Rospach
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
>(and it doesn't make lots of sense to write neat hacks to a commercial
>server).
Chuq, I'll let your other comments slip through without starting a flame
war :-), but THAT is a really silly thing to say! I have written tons of
neat hacks for a variety of commercial systems ranging from mainframes to
PCs, in fact just about every tool I developed was for a commercial
system of some kind. LISTSERV itself started off as a neat tool for a
proprietary networking and e-mail system where each participating site
had to pay IBM big bucks in pre-req licenses before they could install
LISTSERV. When your job is to run Oracle or SAP or SNA, you write tools
to make your job easier, just like the guy whose job is to run a farm of
Linux boxes. You don't punish yourself by trudging along without the
tools just because it's a commercial system. Take LWGate for instance,
while it does support Majordomo and ListProc it was written primarily and
originally for LISTSERV, by students and on Linux. They did it because it
solved a problem they were having. Most tools are written for this
reason. I'm sure there are a few bigots out there who won't develop for
something commercial under any circumstances, but they're seldom hired to
run commercial products :-)
At L-Soft we run a hobby mailing list service with some 600 lists and
over 600,000 daily deliveries. It is entirely administered by our former
receptionist, part time ("former" because she was promoted after getting
the responsibility officially :-) ). It did not start out this way of
course, but she saw an opportunity for doing something more challenging,
so she read up on LISTSERV and offered to take over the easier aspects,
and eventually she was doing everything other than managing the hardware
itself. She explains things to customers before their purchase, takes
orders, creates the lists, answers technical questions, makes backups,
puts lists on hold when people don't pay, etc. The bulk of the work is on
the customer service side, as it should be. People who send checks to the
Montana office we don't have, who have a problem with their AOL account,
etc. She is smart and knows how to run programs and so on, but she
doesn't know how to write them, so I imagine she found what she needed on
the net, or maybe talked a junior programmer into writing scripts for
her. The point is, I don't even know what she's using (I live in another
country), which suggests she was able to find what she needed without
trouble, otherwise she would have complained to our internal technical
staff list ;-) I don't think you can say that there are automatically
more or better tools for Majordomo just because it's open, available and
hackable. LISTSERV was free until 1993 (including freely available source
code) and I haven't noticed a change in the development of free tools
when it went commercial. I just don't think the kind of people who run
LISTSERV (and might develop tools) care about such things.
Eric
