Re: Censorship alive and well on frameusers

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

On Mon, 21 Nov 2005 21:03:15 -0500, Art Campbell 
<art.campbell@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>As much as I admire your spirit... framers is a privately owned commercial
>list, and the owners are the owners. 

WRONG, Wrong, wrong!  It is not, never has been, and never
will be, any more than the ANWR is owned by the oil companies.
The original framers was a community list that predated the
takeover by Brad by many years; I was on it back when it was
hosted on uunet.  Brad did not buy the list, because there 
was no-one to buy it from.  The *only* other way one can own 
a list is to start it from scratch, asking people to opt-in.  
Brad never did that.  Ergo, he never owned it.  Simple truth.

The framers listadmin has always been a volunteer, usually at
a university that was willing to host it.  Brad squatted on
it and claimed, falsely, to be the owner after enough newbies
had joined that he thought he had some credibility... IMHO
it was theft from the community, and I said that publically
when he announced he was putting ads on every post.  This
led to the creation of Free Framers, in fairly short order.
And stopped the addition of the ads.  ;-)

>As they say in the US (well, some of us say): 
>"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."
>A. J. Liebling

Fortunately, the Web has changed that again.  ;-)

>And censorship works very well; your message wouldn't have gotten through
>if there hadn't been another "press" available. (Thanks, Jeremy!)

Which is why there is another press, and always will be, one
that will *never* be commercial.  I don't "own" it, the whole
community does; I'm the current listadmin, that's all.  If I
no longer want to run it, or if enough members want someone
else to do that (as a volunteer), I'll pass it on cheerfully.

>And Mailman... I think it's a great little program. Open source. Free.
>Maybe the archiving isn't as good as Yahoo's, but you don't have the
>penalty of having your address broadcast either.

<sigh>  A few years ago I thought it looked good, too, and
tried to move Free Framers to it.  No good.  It just won't
scale; a couple hundred users strains it, and I have no
idea how Lisa can manage with the frameusers list on it.
The trouble is, it's written in interpreted Python...  So
far, I've found no real working substitute for majordomo,
and I'd dearly love to find one...


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