[Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Jens Fisseler]

On Fri, 13 Jul 2007, Andrew Coppin wrote:

> Mark T.B. Carroll wrote:
> > Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com> writes:
> >
> >   
> > > ...and when you view a web page, your web browser has to connect to a
> > > web server somewhere.
> > >
> > > I don't see your point...
> > >     
> >
> > Very many news servers will only serve news to people on the network of
> > whoever's running the server: i.e. a rather restricted 'customer' base.
> >   
> 
> Really? Most web servers will accept a connection from anybody. (Unless it's
> *intended* to be an Intranet.) I'm not quite sure why somebody would configure
> their NNTP server differently...

That's probably because someone has to pay for maintenance. Most of the 
time, this will be the one who is running the server. So, if *you* were 
running a NNTP server and had to pay monthly fees and other recurring 
costs, whom would you grant access to your NNTP server?

With web servers, you, as the reader or consumer, don't have to pay for 
the access, because the owner of the web server takes care of these costs, 
because he/she probably gains some sort of benefit from this.

Regards,

Jens