gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) (01/01/89)
Dan Stenger quoted Charles Geschke of Adobe from a SIGGRAPH panel in an earlier message. I think Geschke's comments bear some careful analysis. I'm not saying that he intended to mislead, but he certainly said things in a way that leaves that possibility open: > "The technology of Display PostScript is something that we have actively been > working on as a graphics technology ever since the inception of our company > back in December of 1982. The technology of DPS is the PostScript interpreter, which they have indeed been working on since '82. It says nothing about when they started working on DPS itself. > ... It is a misconception that we did not want to > do Display PostScript, even though I'm certain that's the impression James had > [referring to an earlier comment about Adobe attempting to hire James Gosling > before he went to Sun]. This doesn't say that they DID want to do it. It says that if you think they DIDN'T want to do it, you are incorrect. They were not opposed to PostScript on screens; my recollection is that they were delighted by SunDEW; at that point PostScript was not a guaranteed success in the printer market, so a serious endorsement by Sun helped them. Later they realized that Sun's effort would make them no money because Sun wanted a product that would be licensable on terms like NFS, while Adobe's only terms are Draconian (NOBODY, BUT NOBODY gets source code). Kinda hard to do enough ports to make a 'standard', widely available window system, without source code. > Actually, from the very beginning, and our very first > licensees, many of them actively pursued the feasibility of PostScript for > displays." They may have "pursued the feasibility", but I guess they all decided it wasn't feasible -- until Sun went ahead and did it. -- John Gilmore {sun,pacbell,uunet,pyramid,amdahl}!hoptoad!gnu gnu@toad.com Love your country but never trust its government. -- from a hand-painted road sign in central Pennsylvania