Re: The Price Of Admission. Unacceptable.

[Jim Dixon <jdd@matthew.uk1.vbc.net>]

On Fri, 12 Sep 1997, John Charles Broomfield wrote:

> > If each member of Nominet had to come up with a $10K joining fee and
> > a $300K line of credit, Nominet would have a dozen or so members and
> > be surrounded by simmering resentment with periodic calls for a 
> > Parliamentary investigation.
> ...
> ".uk" first had academic facilities and personnel doing everything, so the
> state was paying, then a few "biggies" came and financed, and finally it got
> opened up. (Yes, I know it's oversimplifying.).

It's oversimplifying things to the point where it is completely wrong.
.UK was run by the naming committee, which was essentially the 
dozen or so members of the LINX.  The software was written by Oliver
Smith of Demon on a volunteer basis in his spare time.  The name 
servers were supplied by EUnet GB; several others were more than 
willing to supply alternative servers, including VBCnet.  There was
no shortage of volunteers.

Has anyone asked whether anyone would volunteer to do something similar
for CORE?

> > > members will initially pledge/loan cash to CORE to form it properly). 
> > This is strangely circular reasoning.  If CORE had lower joining 
> > requirements it would have a lot more members and a lot more cash.
> 
> And most surely no way of getting business done at all. Remember that
> nominet was "given" a working system which it remodelled (remodelling done
> as much as you want, but something was there anyway), so it's easier to
> implement CHANGES.  CORE has to CREATE stuff. 

Has anyone bothered to ask whether Nominet would simply given them the
existing running code?

Do you realize that the Nominet code was done in a few weeks?

> Do you *really* think things would be done? Just to put an example of
> something along these lines, PAB had from day one just over 100 members, and
> no function other than "advise PAB". Just getting the group to decide HOW to
> vote took around 2 months or so, and even so it was percieved that maybe it
> wasn't really the good way, so the initial set of officers were given a
> short "governing" period to stabilize decision making mechanisms so that the
> next bunch would be perfectly well placed.
> The more you have, the more difficult it is to put mechanisms in place
> (unless they exist already).

Give me .firm or one of the other new silly gTLDs.  Give me a small
financial incentive.  I will have a name server up for it within 
one working day.  We will just use the gTLD server that we have 
idle at the LINX in London.  Get NSI to point the root name servers
at it and you will see .firm test domains globally the same day.
Give me a couple of weeks and we will have running registry software 
similar to the Nominet system.  

This is not complex stuff.  It is actually pretty simple.  It's just
that some people just have a talent for creating unbelievably complex
situations.

--
Jim Dixon                                                 Managing Director
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