Welcome to comp.std.unix

[Sean Eric Fagan]

Submitted-by: seanf at sco.COM (Sean Eric Fagan)

Welcome to comp.std.unix!  (Or, of course, the std-unix-list mailing list.
I will generally only mention the newsgroup, although almost everything is
applicable to both.)  Here is part of what John said in the first posting to 
the group, lo these many years ago:

	This moderated newsgroup, mod.std.unix, is for discussions of UNIX
	standards, in particular the one in progress by the IEEE P1003 "UNIX
	Standards" committee.  P1003 is the successor to the /usr/group
	standards committee, and many of the members are the same.

The names have changed, and things have moved on.  The net has been
reorganized since then, and P1003 has spawned, repeatedly.  I have been
reading this group for several years now, and have enjoyed it immensely; it
had the highest signal-to-noise ratio of any of the techinical groups I
read, and rarely strayed from its purpose.  When John called for a new
moderator, I volunteered for the job, with the intention of trying to keep
up the level of standards (no pun intended) that John managed to maintain.
I am sure I will make a few mistakes as I get used to the job, so I ask you
all to bear with me.

During the discussions leading to the selection of me as moderator, concern
was raised about my biases, being as I work for a company that sells UNIX
and UNIX-related products.  In response to that, I wrote the following:

	As some of you may notice from the From: line, I work at SCO, 
	which is in the business of selling UNIX-based software (including 
	operating systems).  Some of you may wonder how much, if at all, 
	my job will affect my ability as moderator.  My response is that 
	it will not.

	I believe that the moderator's job is to ensure that the charter of 
	the newsgroup is upheld.  That is, to make sure that the discussions 
	pertain to UNIX standards (including, but not limited to, POSIX).  
	I will neither favor nor reject any submitted article simply because 
	of my job at SCO; my only grounds for rejection will be irrelevance, 
	and possibly redundancy (e.g., thirty people respond with the same 
	answer to a posted question).

	My employer supports my doing this job, for their own reasons 
	(officially, SCO is pro-Standards, and anything we can do to promote 
	those standards is good for us).  If they decide, at some point, that 
	they do not wish to do this any longer, I can, and will, shift over 
	to my home computer, which has its own news and mail feed.  I am 
	using the company's resources simply because they are so much larger 
	than mine:  *I* do not have to worry about maintaining the machines, 
	nor making sure the mail connections continue to work, etc.  (They 
	also have more disk space than I do, an important consideration.)

	I do not expect any conflict of interest to appear because I work 
	at SCO.  If anyone has any doubts, please feel free to discuss 
	them with me.

With that, I start my job as moderator.  The next posting will contain quite
a bit of general information, about the group and how to submit messages to
it, and will be posted at the beginning of every volume.  Once again, I
apologize in advance for any mistakes I make.

Sean Eric Fagan
sef at sco.COM, sef at kithrup.COM, sef at uunet.uu.net

Volume-Number: Volume 23, Number 1