re Email Grabber

Steve Nisbet (s.nisbet@doc.mmu.ac.uk)
Wed, 15 Jan 1997 17:21:04 +0000

I must admit I find your reply extreme Mr Raisch.
Ive been following this list since its inception, and may others beside.
My knowledge of the web goes well back into its history and I can
definately say that most of the development on both the Web and the
Internet had been achieved by people cross polinating ideas, stealing
ideas and copying the work of others, both with and without their
permission. All of the original work on the Internet was orignated in
academic cirles donated and changed freely, and more often than not
written in languages obtained freely through the very same institution.

A good many of those people involved in the initial stages of this work
have gone on into very lucrative employment, thousands of people have
learned and cribbed and snatched and in a great many cases outright
copied sections of code and ideas, some of them formed companies and
most of them are making a killing. As soon as a smart piece of software
hits the Net it proliferates and everyone ends up using it, its the
nature of the beast.

This very newsgroup and others (W3C, HTML discussion, ISOC and others)
support the free transmission of ideas and comments, we use each others
code, we swap things we didnt work on 'the hard way'.

Whilst I do not agree with the email grabber, I think you could have
argued your comments more constructively and without viciousness and
errors of fact it was strewn with.

Steve Nisbet
Web Admin
DOC MMU
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