peterd@cs.mcgill.ca (Peter Deutsch) (01/18/91)
Okay, I've seen the requests for a break in all of this,
and since I helped kick it off I'll try to help wrap it up.
I originally posted after having received a number of
pieces of email and seeing postings asking (for the n'th
time) about when or if mouse-X would be running under
NeXTStep 2.0. I wanted to give the answer (which is "maybe
not") but I also wanted to address a larger issue, which
is the difficulty at least one customer (School of
COmputer Science, McGill University) was having getting
technical questions addressed from NeXT when it was for a
project which seemed to not have much support at NeXT. I
felt that there was considerable difficulty, and I began
to believe it was due to an inability or unwillingness
from NeXT to accept X. The issue had grown beyond support
for a rival windowing system (which was still important)
to one of whether NeXT could or would support efforts at
developing open systems software of any type on NeXTen.
Well, I saw a lot of opinions about X expressed on the
net, which was interesting, but more importantly to me, I
received mail from a number of different people at NeXT
which addressed the various parts of my concerns. I don't
think it appropriate or proper "netiquette" to forward
private email without the consent of the sender, so I wont
post what I received, but I think it fair to say that the
various letters, taken together, adequately address 85-90
percent of my concerns. I am now reasonably happy and
posting to let you all know it. (Yeah, I know. Some of you
don't care diddly-squat if I'm happy or not, but since I
complained publicly, I think to be fair I should say if
I'm no longer complaining and haven't just lost my
newsfeed. :-).
I am now convinced of the following:
1) Yes, I accept now that X will run on NeXTen,
and soon, with some official blessing. It will
not be mouse-X, it may not be PD, but there
should be a $149 server very soon from Pencomm
and at least one other effort is apparently
underway and getting help from NeXT.
2) Yes, NeXT has been and will be helping third
parties develop an X port. Our problems appear
to be due to communications problems, and
others assure me they are happy with the suppor
they are receiving. Some of this may be due to
our desire for a stand-alone server, some to
personalities, some to just plain confusion.
Whatever, it appears not to be the general
experience with the company.
3) NeXT has legitimate concerns about giving us
the specific info Mike asked for (kernel level
calls for obtaining mouse and keyboard events,
among other things). As expressed to me, their
concern is that such info is not part of the
specified API interface, so is subject to change.
As we've already found out, that means things
break between revisions. I'd still like the
info, but I understand their side more clearly
now.
4) NeXT was not "censoring" what kind of projects
people do on their machines. I suspect part of
all this was that they were scrambling to get
the big release out. they wanted to do a good
job on this and they sem to have suceeded.
They _are_ a small company, and that must be
factored in.
I was pleased with the final outcome of this. I think the
fact that I could get people fairly high up at NeXT to
send me email after going to the net speaks well for the
company. Of course, I would have preferred hearing some of
the things I heard way back in November or December, and
I'd still like a stand-alone version of mouse-X (or any
other PD version, I'm no zealot), but I must be fair.
Several people finally wrote to explain the problems they
were having and I appreciate that. I'd especially like to
thank Avie Tenadian and Chris MacAskill for their letters.
So if you're keeping score, I'd like to make it clear that
I still like the machines and understand more the problems
of a small company like NeXT in supporting users and
simultaneously doing a major release of machines and
software. Mouse didn't get the info he wanted yet, but
that wasn't the main point to me. I don't speak for mouse,
but at least I'm fairly happy with NeXT again.
Now we'll see what our students can do with them....
- peterd
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" Although botanically speaking a fruit, in 1893 the U.S. Supreme Court
unanimously ruled that tomatoes are a vegetable (and thus taxable under
the Tariff Act of 1883) because of the way they are usually served. "
ref: Smithsonian, August, 1990.
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