Asii.122 net.general utzoo!decvax!ittvax!sii!wje Tue May 4 09:52:28 1982 Commercial News Some time ago, SII sent out a product update notice and asked what people thought about such things. The responses have been collected and run 4 to 1 in favor of commercial notices being available, as long as they are not intended to be pure sales hype. (OUR widget is better than THEIR widget because they are jerks.. ) The objections were not because of inherent bias against commercial information, but rather because of: 1) Questions about how commercial traffic affects holders of educational licenses. I wouldn't think that there would be any problem, any comments? 2) Having disinterested sites pay for the messages to be passed around. Given the vast quantities of junk that goes over the net, our site would be more than happy to see useful information available, such as more technical info, notices of new research papers, new Unix products, etc. In any case, most of the users of our product are on the net, consisting primarily of Bell, Western, and ATT sites, along with some major university sites. There was a comment that the majority of Usenet sites are educational institutions. I suspect that this is probably not the case, assuming that one doesn't count Bell sites as educational. Decvax certainly isn't, and is a major supporter of the network. Has anyone actually made a count? That would be an interesting bit of information. Mark Horton suggested a 'net.commercial' news group, which I think is a great idea, not because we have a lot of products to sell (we don't), but because it would be nice to know what's available. How about it? -Bill Ezell Software Innovations, Inc. (ittvax!sii!wje) (decvax!sii!wje) (harpo!sii!wje) ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.