*BSD News Article 37972


Return to BSD News archive

Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!msuinfo!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!uunet!psinntp!adam.cc.sunysb.edu!newsserv.cs.sunysb.edu!sayre
From: sayre@cs.sunysb.edu (Johannes Sayre)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: where's the money ?
Followup-To: comp.unix.bsd
Date: 17 Nov 1994 04:20:18 GMT
Organization: State University of New York, Stony Brook (guest)
Lines: 36
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <3aelm2$in4@newsserv.cs.sunysb.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: sbgrad4.cs.sunysb.edu
Summary: who's screwing the industry's future
Keywords: disingenuous questions

In the spirit of ingenuous wide-eyed questions, here's one:

Anyone know of the truth of the story that CSRG's funding was cut because
their output threatened participants in the industry more constrained by
business concerns or hemmed in by competitive traditions ?

And by whom ?  Was Bush personally involved ?  Was it the more slow-witted,
senior members of the national security complex cutting their own throats
once again ?  The younger, really corroded ones for whom anything that isn't
bent needs to be bent until it understands the primacy of worldly power ?
Or was it just effective lobbying Connecting with the old boys' network and
some numb administrators ?)  (Or was it truly just a Republican administration
running out of money... mumble...)

If it was all straight and clean, great.  If not, won't you let us know about
it ?  It's not just CSRG, other major academic programs are going away, too.
Are they being replaced ?  Does any current analog to say, Bell Labs exist ?
Our computing environment today is based on work whose functionality wasn't
intentionally crippled to prevent it from taking market share from other
products, work that wasn't compromised in aid of the blind fumblings of
competition, but work that was designed by people educated enough to correctly,
cleanly instantiate the formalisms of the field, work shaped with rigor and a
sense of aesthetics, not a compromised commodity with toy features designed
to sell well to the mean.  There's more at stake than business profits, or
who comes out on top in today's computer industry, and if government and
industry leaders are too stupid to realize that, that's a problem and needs
to be rectified from a different quarter.  It would be nice to avoid a
situation where the only computer products available are poorly organized
trash, proudly trumpeted as being "world class" by the illiterates who governed
its shaping.

The florid prose is for the general readership.  If anyone has anything that
might be worth sharing, won't you consider doing so ?  Exposition of truth is
a remarkable lubricant.

Remember, those who can, do.  Those who can't, compete.  Or harass.