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- Submitted-by: seanf@sco.COM (Sean Eric Fagan)
-
- Welcome to comp.std.unix! (Or, of course, the std-unix-list mailing list.
- I will generally only mention the newsgroup, although almost everything is
- applicable to both.) Here is part of what John said in the first posting to
- the group, lo these many years ago:
-
- This moderated newsgroup, mod.std.unix, is for discussions of UNIX
- standards, in particular the one in progress by the IEEE P1003 "UNIX
- Standards" committee. P1003 is the successor to the /usr/group
- standards committee, and many of the members are the same.
-
- The names have changed, and things have moved on. The net has been
- reorganized since then, and P1003 has spawned, repeatedly. I have been
- reading this group for several years now, and have enjoyed it immensely; it
- had the highest signal-to-noise ratio of any of the techinical groups I
- read, and rarely strayed from its purpose. When John called for a new
- moderator, I volunteered for the job, with the intention of trying to keep
- up the level of standards (no pun intended) that John managed to maintain.
- I am sure I will make a few mistakes as I get used to the job, so I ask you
- all to bear with me.
-
- During the discussions leading to the selection of me as moderator, concern
- was raised about my biases, being as I work for a company that sells UNIX
- and UNIX-related products. In response to that, I wrote the following:
-
- As some of you may notice from the From: line, I work at SCO,
- which is in the business of selling UNIX-based software (including
- operating systems). Some of you may wonder how much, if at all,
- my job will affect my ability as moderator. My response is that
- it will not.
-
- I believe that the moderator's job is to ensure that the charter of
- the newsgroup is upheld. That is, to make sure that the discussions
- pertain to UNIX standards (including, but not limited to, POSIX).
- I will neither favor nor reject any submitted article simply because
- of my job at SCO; my only grounds for rejection will be irrelevance,
- and possibly redundancy (e.g., thirty people respond with the same
- answer to a posted question).
-
- My employer supports my doing this job, for their own reasons
- (officially, SCO is pro-Standards, and anything we can do to promote
- those standards is good for us). If they decide, at some point, that
- they do not wish to do this any longer, I can, and will, shift over
- to my home computer, which has its own news and mail feed. I am
- using the company's resources simply because they are so much larger
- than mine: *I* do not have to worry about maintaining the machines,
- nor making sure the mail connections continue to work, etc. (They
- also have more disk space than I do, an important consideration.)
-
- I do not expect any conflict of interest to appear because I work
- at SCO. If anyone has any doubts, please feel free to discuss
- them with me.
-
- With that, I start my job as moderator. The next posting will contain quite
- a bit of general information, about the group and how to submit messages to
- it, and will be posted at the beginning of every volume. Once again, I
- apologize in advance for any mistakes I make.
-
- Sean Eric Fagan
- sef@sco.COM, sef@kithrup.COM, sef@uunet.uu.net
-
- Volume-Number: Volume 23, Number 1
-
-