bob@osu-eddie.UUCP (02/09/87)
In article <499@viper.UUCP> dave@viper.UUCP (David Messer) writes: >In article <1850001@hpcvlo.HP.COM> karen@hpcvlo.HP.COM (Karen Helt) writes: > >Adobe has no connection with Sun and NeWS. Sun bought the book > >with the specification and did all their own work. Adobe gets no > >money out of NeWS. > >According to a talk I heard last Wednesday from an employee of Sun, >NeWS uses the Adobe fonts and Sun and Adobe are probably cooperating >for extensions to PostScript. > (Please notice that I am cross-posting this to comp.windows.x because of the Subject:, although the current discussion has diverged from X a bit. It has certainly diverged from graphics a bit. Cross- pollenation can't hurt.) According to a talk I heard last Thursday from an employee of Sun (named Bill Joy), although James Gosling discussed his Postscript extensions with the Adobe folks early in SunDEW's development, there is no active effort within Sun to have Adobe `certify' the extensions as standards. Some of the extensions are of course of interest to someone describing printers (3-d, color), some are not (input), and some I'm not sure about yet (non-blocking lightweight processes). The reason there is no active effort is this: Sun's attitude is that they are now driving the industry so far as standards and development thereof is concerned, not only in UNIX (in cooperation with ATT) but now in user interfaces. They expect the `natural technical and aesthetic superiority' (my paraphrase of what I perceived as Joy's attitude) of NeWS to shine through and convince the entire world within five years. Everyone and his brother is now implementing NFS and maybe Yellow Pages, following in Sun's lead, after Sun implemented the initial proof-of-concept. So Sun considers that they no longer need to get Adobe's blessing for their extensions, since Adobe is no longer (effectively) defining the standards (from Sun's point of view). They also consider that they don't need to endorse X because they see X as just one more thing that NeWS can do. Joy called X "just RasterOp on wheels". I'm not sure yet whether I agree, but Bill Joy is a convincing evangelist. It's dangerous to go listen and talk with him - your mind might be altered :-) -- Bob Sutterfield, Department of Computer and Information Science The Ohio State University; 2036 Neil Ave. Columbus OH USA 43210-1277 bob@ohio-state.{arpa,csnet} or ...!cb{osgd,att}!osu-eddie!bob (614) 292 - 0915 or (614) 292 - 5813