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[Rick Moen]

begin Lawrence E. Rosen quotation:

> (1) Discussions about licenses are the most important immediate function
> of license-discuss.
> 
> (2) Discussions about other issues (legal, political, philosophical,
> etc.) about a wide range of topics are invaluable to the community but
> don't often affect license reviews.

One architecture that may meet OSI's needs:

- At least two e-mail mailing lists (one of them possibly moderated),
- bidirectionally gated to a small newsgroup server (e.g., leafnode
  2.0beta)

I personally have used Mailman/leafnode setup and found them to work
well.  I know Russ favours ezmlm, and presumably he can do something
similar with it.  (Both ezmlm and Mailman provide integral Web-achiving.)

One of the advantage of having a Janus-faced e-mail/netnews setup is
that people with an ongoing or on-again-off-again interest in the
discussion can casually come and leave via the news-spool side, without
the administrative overhead of subscribing/unsubscribing -- and it's 
easy to pick up (and follow up on) a discussion thread that hasn't 
been posted to in a day or so, something not feasible upon joining a
mailing list.  Past news "articles" (posts) are equally as accessible
for comment as new ones.  

And netnews doesn't avalanche your mailbox, because it doesn't get
mailed to you.  Everyone reads off the central spool.

The conclusion that Web forums are your best alternative seems poorly
supported.

-- 
Cheers,     "All my life, I wanted to _be_ someone.   I guess I should have
Rick Moen    been more specific."        -- Jane Wagner
--
license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3