From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Feb 29 10:03:22 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id KAA26274 for hackers-outgoing; Thu, 29 Feb 1996 10:03:22 -0800 (PST) Received: from phaeton.artisoft.com (phaeton.Artisoft.COM [198.17.250.211]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id KAA26266 for ; Thu, 29 Feb 1996 10:03:20 -0800 (PST) Received: (from terry@localhost) by phaeton.artisoft.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id KAA11831; Thu, 29 Feb 1996 10:56:02 -0700 From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199602291756.KAA11831@phaeton.artisoft.com> Subject: Re: AOL client software To: phk@critter.tfs.com (Poul-Henning Kamp) Date: Thu, 29 Feb 1996 10:56:02 -0700 (MST) Cc: pechter@shell.monmouth.com, FreeBSD-hackers@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <3449.825609835@critter.tfs.com> from "Poul-Henning Kamp" at Feb 29, 96 05:03:55 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk > > Don't laugh. Terry's right. > > > > There's a lot of people who boot dos/windows just to get to their AOL mail > > account. For a while it was the only private internet mailbox I had since > > work was very intermittant (the US Army must hire net admins from the > > US postal service). > > Well, if the market is there, who's going to debug their protocol ? Someone needs to offer them to do a UNIX port, with the provision that AOL provides their source code for the port, and the resulting distributed version are binary-only (per their ubiquitous floppies). AOL might even hire you to do the job for them. They *must* be feeling pressure from the Compuserve client that works over the Internet, NetScape, and products like "PointCast". Plus half their business runs on a UNIX/Cisco backbone (they own a lot of providers, and that number is increasing). You wouldn't have to doc the protocol unless you wanted to do a server, and AOL is probably not interested in helping something like that. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.