Mike Miller wrote,
> [...] getting participation at a university level
>would be interesting, since there are two large universities in the
>area.
Before everybody gets excited about how wonderful it's going to be with
university support, let me share a cautionary tale that might be
relevant.
Back in the early 90's, when the U of O was still trying to figure out
whether they should let all students have Internet access or keep limiting
it to graduate students who needed it for their research, I belonged to a
student group ("Campus Information Exchange", or CIE) that put up a Unix
server and offered memberships to anybody at the U of O to get internet
access. (Naturally this caused certain people in the computer center to
hate us, but that's another story.)
At one point we tried to expand our services by offering access to anybody
in Eugene. That attempt didn't last long...apparently some ISPs complained
to the university that we were using our status as part of a government-
funded institution to compete with their services at a rate they couldn't
afford to match. So rather that face lawsuits, the university forced us
to limit our membership to a closed group...we could get away with
offering access to students and alumni, but not to Eugene at large.
"But," I said, "OSU offers internet connectivity to the public on some of
their servers!"
"That's different," I was told. "OSU is a land-grant college, and as
such, they were able to counter the lawsuit threats by arguing that
according to their charter, they're legally required to engage in
community outreach projects. The U of O has no such legal requirement, so
we can't make that argument."
(These quotes, of course, are paraphrases, but I think they capture the
essence of what I was told.)
Moral: Don't expect the U of O to be willing to have any involvement with
this project, unless it's limited to U of O people. Folks in Corvallis
might have better luck with OSU.
- Neil Parker
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