Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!lll-winken!uunet!mcvax!kth!draken!tut!santra!hemuli!tml
From: tml@hemuli.UUCP (Tor Lillqvist)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: CoSy
Message-ID: <3973@hemuli.UUCP>
Date: 4 May 89 10:07:13 GMT
Reply-To: tml@hemuli.UUCP (Tor Lillqvist)
Organization: Tech Rsrch Cntr of Finland
Lines: 26

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)