Post by Steven SaundersonWill the Microsoft newsgroups actually disappear ?
Here's the deal:
Microsoft has never had an "official" relationship with anything that
might resemble an authoritative usenet body. To be honest, I don't
really know *who* exactly is their primary usenet peer.
What we have instead is some guy named Julien ÉLIE that has taken the
role of sending out the appropriate control messages that enable new
groups to appear on usenet in-step with their creation by Microsoft on
their own server.
So when Microsoft creates the new group "Microsoft.public.windows.Vista"
on their server, Julien takes notice of this and sends out the
appropriate control message that is picked up by other usenet
"entities". By "entities", I mean other operators of usenet servers,
and other quasi-authoritative bodies such as the ISC.org. ISC.org
compiles it's own list of "approved" usenet groups.
So Julien's task up until now has been to be the trusted source of
"housekeeping" information on the microsoft.public.what-ever set of
groups, and as I mention it was always generally assumed that this task
was to *add* new groups over time.
Last November or December, Microsoft performed a major "cleaning" and
removed over 500 newsgroups on it's server. Many of them were
non-english-language groups, many of them for obscure microsoft
products, and many had little to no traffic for some time. Some
examples contrary to that were:
- microsoft.public.win98.display.multi-monitor
- microsoft.public.win98.fat32
So Julien did infact issue the appropriate control messages to remove
those 500+ groups from usenet, and those server operators that choose to
honor those control messages (one way or another) did infact remove
those groups from their server. This is basically an automatic process
for most of them - it's not like they were aware of this situation.
In the above two examples, the usenet server I'm using to post this
message (aioe.org) followed the ISC list and removed those two groups
from it's server.
So that was late last year. Then in early May, Microsoft drops this
bomb that they're going to phase out the operation of their usenet
server, starting June 1 and ending October 1. This has sparked a debate
in some circles as to how to generally handle this situation. One
side-track pertains to the idea or the question of whether or not it's
Julien's role to "administrate" these groups out of existance on
usenet. He seems adament that he thinks it's his role, and I believe
he's going to do it, and by doing it basically end his role or
responsibility for overseeing these groups.
Many people have gotten side-tracked with the idea that Microsoft
somehow controls these groups (either technically or legally) and that
indeed the microsoft groups will disappear from the world-wide usenet
because Microsoft wants them to disappear and can make them disappear.
That is quite a false understanding.
The microsoft.public news groups will disappear on the world-wide usenet
if:
a) Julien ÉLIE issues the requisite check-group and/or rm-group control
messages, and
b) Julien's control messages are honored (directly or indirectly) by
some significant fraction of world-wide usenet servers.
Post by Steven SaundersonIsn't there a Usenet administration that decides what groups exist ?
There is, when it comes to the "big-8" hierarchies, of which the
microsoft.public set of groups is not part of.
Post by Steven SaundersonWhether individual servers support them or not is another matter.
As I described above.
Post by Steven SaundersonThe possible difference with MS groups is that the name starts
with Microsoft so if they demand the groups disappear then
perhaps the administration will comply.
And Microsoft can also ask that no books, magazines or newspaper
articles be written about them, or titled after them?
I think not. The names of usenet newsgroups are not anyone's legal
property. They are a form of free speech.
Microsoft can no more ask or demand that newsgroups containing
"microsoft" in the group-name be removed from usenet any more than they
can ask all librarians to remove any or all entries in their card
catalogs that have "microsoft" printed on the index cards.