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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.