newstrom@newstaffinc.com (Harvey Newstrom) writes:
>It was sad that we espoused spontaneous order, self-rule and anarchy,
>but couldn't actually get it to work on the List. Anyone else have more
>details about what happened with the PPL experiments?
Back around 1993 or 1994, setting up one's own mailing list appeared sufficiently hard that people tended to treat lists the way they treat geographical regions - the cost of political battles over list management appeared lower than the cost of moving to another list. The list maintainers were understandably reluctant to allow unlimited changes in legal systems to people using the resources that the list maintainers owned, and never made it clear what kind of competition they would allow. Times have changed, and setting up a competing list is now clearly easier than producing competing legal systems within a given list.
newstrom@newstaffinc.com (Harvey Newstrom) writes:
>We kept hearing about List software being developed and refined. There
>was a massive programming project to develop this, as far as I remember.
>Now I see we are running off-the-shelf software (MajorDomo).
>
>Whatever happened to the original List Software project?
That software was closed source, and intended to make a profit for it's authors. MajorDomo probably became a much more massive programming project because it didn't restrict users from participating in the programming effort.
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