Re: History lesson (VERY LONG)

["Jeremy H. Griffith" <jeremy@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 11 Feb 2002 03:41:32 -0500, Brad Anderson <brad@FrameUsers.com> 
wrote:

Much of what Brad said, in the first part of his post, is quite 
true, though he describes his dreams and ignores the actual 
implementation of them.  No mention of the *several* Frame experts 
who have been banned from Framers for one reason or another.  (I 
have proof of this.)  No mention of the repeated and lengthy server 
failures, before he moved in with Eric Ray.  And of course nobody 
in their right mind would run any list on a server with only one 
T-1; our present one has several T-3s, and the new one we're about 
to move to for Free Framers has eight big pipes to different 
backbone providers; it hosts top-level domains for entire countries, 
at <http://www.pair.com>.  But I don't want to waste a lot of 
bandwidth here.  I'll just say that I truly appreciate what Brad 
has done to help over the years, as he well knows from our private 
correspondence, and felt totally sandbagged and betrayed by his 
decision to "commercialize" (his term) the *list* itself.

>Is our intent to make money with the site, workshop, and lists?  Yep, just
>as Jeremy wishes to make a living selling mif2go and whatever other services
>he provides.  We all like to get paid for a days work.  

Certainly!

>We've spent much
>more than we've ever made up to this point to develop the goal of support
>site and user community.  We only wish to make money on the site to further
>develop it.  

Still no problem, the *site* is Brad's.  I have no problem with
that, and never have.  As he knows.  My only complaints about
the site have been about usability, and have been made as very
friendly suggestions and observations.

And here is the old switcheroo:

>The simple truth is that adding 6 lines of text to the bottom
>of the email lists will not greatly affect bandwidth.  

The *list*?  The list is not the site!  The arguments about the
site do not justify the takeover of the list.  I am quite sure
we have outspent Brad in this area... and that does *not* entitle
us to try to get "our" money back from the community!

>Most members already have longer signatures than that anyway.   

My normal one is two lines.  My recent one giving sub info for
Free Framers is four lines, the old Usenet limit.

>Notice that those most opposed to
>the paid advertising have signature lines advertising their
>wares/services/etc. and also post their wares to the list.

Oh?  I make a strict point of only mentioning Mif2Go when it
is directly relevant to a posted question.  I decided to use
an ANN: last week, for the first time in years, because of
the gift we wanted to make to *all* Framers, Free and other.
So far, we've shipped 149 copies, about $45K of product,
under that offer, and requests are still coming in steadily.
That is a *gift*, and we don't expect anyone else to send us
one dollar for it!

>------------------------------------------------------------------
>Response to Jeremy's truths below for those interested
>------------------------------------------------------------------
>From the start, Jeremy and a very small group of others have resisted the
>manner in which we administer the list.  

About fifty of us, actually, in the core group... and over
400 on Free Framers.  With zero promotion.

>They have maintained that since
>FrameUsers.com is owned by my company, the company should not make any money
>running the site or the list.   

That's a deliberate lie.  As I said above, I've never objected
to Brad doing what he pleased with the site, even when he put
up a "support list" for mif2go without telling me... :-(  He
knows this.  My objection is to his commercializing the *list*;
that is a form of theft from all of us, selling back our own
speech to us.

>Ads are somehow "unethical" and somehow I have some "conflict of 
>interest" running the list because I am a FrameMaker consultant.

Total lies.  I never even *heard* of the second one before; good
grief, almost everyone *here* is a FrameMaker consultant!

>With all the howling and complaining about ethics and how the 
>list/site is run, notice the hypocrisy in the criticisms. 

Notice the conflation of list and site again.  This blurring
of commercial and public-service boundaries is exactly what
allowed Enron to rob tens of thousands of people... ;-)  But
seriously, as I made clear in my initial response to Brad's
post on commercialization, I addressed *only* the plan for 
the list, and said nothing about the site; that's fine.

And if six lines (on top of the ten lines of admin info,
compared to Free Framers' two lines) were the only problem,
perhaps it would be tolerable.  I said nothing about the
many more lines on every post when Brad promoted his fee-
based conferences.  But to make ads interesting to the
advertisers, some content censorship comes too... as I
have been told happens already on Techwhirlers.  It is
the proverbial camel's nose.  We can't afford that.

I just noticed the very long list of particulars below;
don't know yet if I will subject everyone to more of
this, but am inclined not to.  I think the evidence is
pretty clear.  I note that many statements in the next
section are knowing fabrications, and leave it at that.

>Using Jeremy's own idea of "ethics", who's being more "ethical"?

Your call.

-- Jeremy H. Griffith, at Omni Systems Inc.
   (jeremy@omsys.com)     http://www.omsys.com/
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