That explains why, and removes one irritant I've had with the UofO from the 90's. I had friends with access to the PDP but could never get access myself. :/
Sent from my iPhone On Mar 14, 2011, at 23:58, [email protected] (Neil Parker) wrote: > 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 > _______________________________________________ > EUGLUG mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug _______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
