The Commercial use of Grex discussion item

Feb 14 12:05 UTC 1996

There has been some discussion in baff mail about commercial use of Grex for
email support, advertising Web pages, etc.  This was spawned by a Grex user
complaining about somebody using Grex to support a commercial venture without
even being a paid member.

This is the Coop item to continue that discussion.

How should Grex deal with commercial use?  Yes/no/discouraged,
member/nonmember, etc., what kind of policy do we want?

response 2 of 45:

Feb 14 15:14 UTC 1996

   My feeling is, if someone comes onto Grex for the purpose of
sending some commercially oriented mail, thats OK, provided they
don't create an avalanche of responses.

   I have seen, and stopped, people who make a big splash in their
.plan files,  "XXXX commercial entrprises!" and things like that.
There have been a few people who've taken out multiple accounts for
things like sales, tech support, bug reports, etc. all at once, with
similar sounding names.  When approached, these people have *always*
said that they wern't aware of anything about Grex, like its slow net
link, and displayed generall cluelessness in general.  These people
have always gone away after being informed of the situation here.

   Another slightly different class of commercial user has been the
pyramid scheme people.  We've had about three Amyway types here, and
more recently people who are trying to sell long-distance prepaid
phonecard things via Grex.  The most notable was "Call Card USA"
which folded after two months of operation and left owing many people
money that they'd earned getting more customers into the system.

   It's things like that, that I don't want to see, espically the
quasi-legal things.

   The little businessperson however, who needs to send/receive some
small amount of mail is fine by me.  I wish they'd help us out a little,
but thats life.  I will bet that we've had hundreds of these types too.
If we don't notice them, I don't think its a problem.  Their volume of
mail is a LOT less than the people who subscribe to three or four large
mailing lists.

response 4 of 45:

Feb 15 01:40 UTC 1996

I agree with what steve said in response 2.

response 6 of 45:

Feb 15 10:17 UTC 1996

Dues to join GREX as a paying member are reasonable.  $60/year
is a small price to pay.  I have a concern about people who
set up accounts for business purposes and aren't willing
to pay for the resource.  These folks make money using GREX
and freeload on everyone else.  I can certainly understand
someone who writes some shareware and makes it available
to friends, etc.  These people aren't hitting a large commercial
market.  However, when an account is set up solely for commercial
purposes and the individual is conducting business with
large corporations (auto, utilities) it would seem to
me that they can surely afford to pay for the GREX resources
they are using.  The GREX signon message when I first joined
encouraged people who could afford to do so to pay.  There
were words I don't recall exactly but likened free loaders
to road-kill (bad smell, etc.)  Perhaps if those who
personally benefit economically from using GREX carried
their share of the load, there would be funds to support
system upgrades and other work which would benefit all.

response 8 of 45:

Feb 15 14:23 UTC 1996

Um, actually the account that received the complaint was a second account of
a paying Grex member.  He *is* supporting the system.

I've known of maybe 4 commercial accounts on the system that belonged to
paying members.  They all had very low volumes of e-mail.  As I see it, that
use is OK.

The kind of use STeve describes, of clueless people trying to set up Grex as
a big mass-mailing address, that's not OK.

response 10 of 45:

Feb 15 14:29 UTC 1996

There are also a few small non-profit organizations that have accounts.
The ones I know of are administered by paying members. I have expressed
the opinion elsewhere that Grex should particularly welcome use by
non-profits as a public service.

response 12 of 45:

Feb 15 14:44 UTC 1996

My apologies if I made an error there - but why isn't janh in members:
or voters: in /etc/aliases, then? 

response 14 of 45:

Feb 15 20:13 UTC 1996

I believe it has always worked in the past to discourage businesses by
pointing out the facts: they're using a system that is not well suited
for their needs, isn't likely to present them in the best possible
light, and the expense of an account at a system specifically designed
and better suited to their needs is trivial compared to the budget of
any viable commercial concern.

response 16 of 45:

Feb 16 01:27 UTC 1996

When I heard about this problem, I thought that the solution would be to
drop the cyberspace.org domain name in favor of something which would
discourage commercial uses of grex.  If my e-mail address would be
free-and-slow.org or trailing-edge-of-technology.org I might not want to
use it for business. But knowing that some people view cyberspace.org as
our most valuable asset, I would not have suggested that in public. 
Here's my new idea.  E-mail coming from grex should get a line in the
header like: 

Organization: Grex is member-owned and volunteer-run.  Donations welcome.

Each piece of e-mail that goes out would remind someone of the important
things about us whether or not it is commercial traffic.  Therefore
discriminating against commercial traffic would not be an issue.

response 18 of 45:

Feb 16 07:34 UTC 1996

Grex is not member-owned. It is owned by a member-based corporation, which
is not itself member-owned. CCI owns itself (as a corporate 'person'). A
more accurate statement would be "Grex is owned by a non-profit
corporation and run by volunteers." But I don't much favor adding
promotional headers to everyone's private mail. It seems rather
presumptous. Better would be to put something in newuser that says "Grex
is not very suitable for business use....<and explain why>." Most
businesses would go elsewhere, unless their use was within the "operating
guidelines" provided in newuser. 

response 20 of 45:

Feb 16 11:09 UTC 1996

yo has a great idea.  I am not sure how we could manage it - too
often in an 'honor system' not all of the participants have much.
10% of the asking price seems fair however.  

response 22 of 45:

Feb 16 19:43 UTC 1996

Re 18: Right, in terms of taxes and accounting grex is owned by a non-profit
corporation but as far as I'm concerned, that's just a technicality.  I stand
by my proposal in # 16 for it's ability to fit on one line and the fact that
is gets the essential information across.

Discouraging non-profit uses of grex in newuser text files can be ignored
by the same people who are ignoring the current stuff in there about our
scarce resources.  By all means put stuff in the newuser text files too. 
But the cleverness about #16 is that it lets people out there on the net
know something about the system where the mail is originating.  It won't
discourage those of us who are proud of what grex is, but it will
discourage most business users who are just too cheap to run their e-mail
sales and support type operations on a real ISP. 

response 24 of 45:

Feb 17 00:56 UTC 1996

I like this.