Brian,
I am a firm believer that 99.9 percent of ALL disagreements in this
world exist because people fail to ask the obvious, simple questions.
Questions are often left unasked because people "presume" the answers
without EVEN providing the opportunity for an answer to be provided.
My suggestion was made in good-faith and certainly seemed to present a
reasonable solution to alleviate *some*, if not all, concerns within the
USGW Project.
It certainly appeared the timing of the formation by Linda of the
archives and the timing of the formation of USGW, were so close that she
may WELL have simply needed some sort of agreement for space for the
archives BEFORE the agreement between USGW as a project came into being.
I *THOUGHT* this was a simple case of everyone failng to ask the obvious
-- i.e why not just consider Linda and the archives project as part of
USGW and hence, have the archives under the same agreement with RootsWeb
as USGW.
I *genuinely* did not see that as being a problem for you. I just
figured noone had bothered to ask.
Of course, immediately after posting my suggestion, I received umpteen
private emails saying, "Good luck. Brian has publicly stated he would
NEVER *allow* those archives to leave RootsWeb."
I was completely UNaware of your ever having taken any such position!
Until now.
You wrote:
Apart from the fact RootsWeb made the mistake of
> accepting such lopsidedly unfair arrangements with some other
> organizations in the past, why do you believe RootsWeb might accept
> such a bad relationship now or in the future?
Your response speaks volumes.
I just hope everyone got it.
Sandy
-----------------------
"Brian Leverich" wrote:
> From: Sandy <teylu(a)home.com>
>
> And I can't figure why Brian would care? Nothing else about USGW
> is "required" to be located on the RootsWeb servers...tho plenty
> of us (myself included) have our pages here. No reason why they
> need to be moved...but the flexibility needs to be there in case
> it's ever needed.
Right now, RootsWeb refuses to host any data on our own site. We
refer all offers of American data to the USGW Archives without
reservation. There's no competition and there's no redundancy.
If RootsWeb ever gets money ahead of what we need basically to keep
the servers alive, one of the first places that money will be spent
is acquiring data for the USGW Archives.
When you talk about "flexibility", you're euphemistically saying "I
want RootsWeb to pony up free unbannered space now, decline offered
datasets and refer them permanently to me, forego the publicity
that RootsWeb might receive if it hosted its own Archives project,
and then I want to be able to walk out of the relationship whenever
I want."
Why is that fair? Apart from the fact RootsWeb made the mistake of
accepting such lopsidedly unfair arrangements with some other
organizations in the past, why do you believe RootsWeb might accept
such a bad relationship now or in the future? -B
--
Dr. Brian Leverich Co-moderator, soc.genealogy.methods/GENMTD-L
RootsWeb Genealogical Data Cooperative
http://www.rootsweb.com/
P.O. Box 6798, Frazier Park, CA 93222-6798 leverich(a)rootsweb.com
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