tml@hemuli.UUCP (Tor Lillqvist) (05/04/89)
A customer of ours has bought some software called CoSy (Conference System) from the University of Guelph in Canada. I guess they are thinking of setting up a commercial (pay-per-minute) conference/bboard/whatever-you-call-it system. Does anybody know anything about CoSy? From what I have looked at it (admittedly not very thoroughly), I wouldn't recommend it. USENET News is after all much better supported, and has a much better spread. CoSy puts the user in a command interpreter of its own, with access to commands like mail, help, join, etc. It doesn't even allow external mail! I don't know if you can connect several CoSy sites to form a network. Wouldn't it be quite easy to set up a chroot'ed restricted shell with rn, mail and kermit available, for instance, to achieve a similar user interface and security. The news 2.11 copyright notice says that it is free as long as there is no profit gained from its use. How do pay-per-minute news sites handle this? Have they bought a license from Rick Adams? Please send me any flames or other comments on CoSy, I will summarize to the net. -- Tor Lillqvist Technical Research Centre of Finland, Computing Services (VTT/ATK) tml%hemuli.uucp@santra.hut.fi (hemuli.atk.vtt.fi, not yet known to Domain System, 130.188.52.2)