Re: VFT 'Royal Red' and CPN

Nigel Hurneyman (NHurneyman@softwar1.demon.co.uk)
Tue, 29 Oct 1996 10:19:17 -0000

You go into your local store to buy a packet of your favourite breakfast
serial. It now comes in a swish new packet, costs many times what it cost
last week, can only be bought in cartons of 100 packets, and all similar
cereals have been removed from the shelves because legal action has been
threatened. Of course you wouldn't want to comment because it might
harm the manufacturer's sales!

As far as I am concerned, CPN was perfectly justified in publishing Colin
Clayton's article. Despite the damage that this facetious PVR has done
to his own business, I found the article to be unemotional, informative and
even humorous. I am looking forward to Dr Clarke's article, and I hope it
contains suggestions about how such an injustice can be avoided in future,
and how the current one can be corrected.

The editors of CPN (congratulations on the brilliant job you are doing)
now have a very difficult decision. Are they aiming for the academic
market, in which case they have to be seen as squeaky clean, but
hopefully will attract more articles in the vein of Dr Schlaur's
magnificent Drosera key. Or are they aiming for the hobbyist, in which
case one of their roles should be to campaign against obvious injustices
in the CP world eg nurseries who collect from the wild, over-zealous
local implementations of CITES, and rogue opportunists who try to make a
fast buck by immoral means. If you have strong views on this, perhaps
you should feed them back to the editors.

Regards, Nigel Hurneyman