I'm not leaping to AOL's defense here, but I have one comment.
The only way that AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve, and MSN will become
educated about the Internet standards is if responsible people go to
work there. At Prodigy, especially, when we started to transition to
open standards, there were perhaps five people who even knew what an RFC
was--we were staffed by mainframe programmers. Compuserve was probably
staffed by those with a BBS'ing background, and even young AOL started off
as a proprietary sustem.
> But AOL, and listen carefully, DOES NOT COOPERATE. AOL, in its attempt
> to co-opt the content and services of the Internet for its own ends,
> frequently causes great inconvenience to the very people who have made
> the Internet as valuable as it is -- the people who run mailing lists,
> moderate newsgroups, etc. This non-cooperation takes many forms; in
> this most recent case, it's an ill-considered attempt by AOL to allow
> its users to block email from certain originating addresses/networks.
> But this is hardly the first time -- it's only been a little while since
> AOL blocked thousands of web sites running what AOL unilaterally decided
> was an unacceptable version of HTTP.
^^^ I believe this last one was a bug.
Remember that these people are human. And that the ones who actually know
how to fix stuff are the ones that are the most overwhelmed.
> And the point is, Anne, that AOL has behaved like an unruly leech on the
> back on the Internet community since the day it was plugged in. AOL does
> not give, it only takes. Even *that* act of ultimate selfishness and
> greed might still be tolerable, but when AOL starts causing more than
> X amount of grief and pain for the volunteers out there (where X
> varies from person to person) like the people on this mailing list,
> then those people have to seriously evaluate just how much time they
> want to spend dealing with AOL's nonsense vs. how much time they
> could spend providing useful services/information to non-AOL users.
I don't disagree with any of that, however...
This whole industry is in a period of rapid transition. Some people need to
go into the organizations that are causing the problems, present themselves as
people who can help them, and get hired onto their technical staffs.
To send a resume, please use
Prodigy: nicolle@prodigy.com
Compuserve: http://www-db.aol.com/corp/careers/
AOL: http://world.compuserve.com/world/corporate/jobs/index.html
if you want to have a major impact on the policies of the major online
services. I know it's not for everybody, but we all need a few more good
technical people.
If you don't believe they'll be around for long: that's OK too. You'll STILL
get a hell of an addition to your resume if you just do the kinds of things
for them that you know they should be doing.
Bonnie Scott
Prodigy, Inc.
Personal: http://pages.prodigy.com/Bonnie/
Follow-Ups:
References:
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