It's not a bad analogy, but it's not great, either. I don't
regard my FAQ as a single, static document, but rather a
dynamic, living thing. This month's FAQ will be different
from last month's; May's will be different from April's, and
so on. Some of these changes are small, and some are great.
If you compared last February's FAQ with that from February
1993, the differences would be considerable. They'd be even
more so if you compared it with the last one Evan kept.
If you package the FAQ and sell it to people on a CD-ROM,
you've taken a snapshot of that everchanging work and sold
it to someone for whom it may do very little good in the
next eight weeks or so. I don't want them to be
disseminating disinformation about what I do.
If they'd asked, in fact, I would have been much more
amenable to having it packaged. I could have added a
prominent rider indicating how you can retrieve the most
recent copy of the FAQ. I would have had the opportunity to
rewrite more substantial parts of it to make it adamantly
clear to the reader what my role is as moderator of
rec.arts.erotica, and what I will and won't do. While this
seems to be mostly clear to Usenet readers now, I'm
concerned about selling the FAQ to Joe BBS, who is more
likely to see my address and start writing to demand GIFs.
Now I don't really have that opportunity. Now either Walnut
Creek will stop distributing this document, or I'm going to
have to deal with a new audience for whom the FAQ in its
present form was not really intended. I think that's
incredibly rude, and is less in keeping with the "Usenet
spirit" than encouraging free and unqualified dissemination
of information.
> In theory, a CD
> of FAQ's is just a news server with an infinite expire time,
Not really. That's just the problem: it's a news server
with infinite expire time which has been irrevocably been
taken off the net.
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