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From: wjs@fred.cs.washington.edu (William Shipley)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Adobe Licensing agreement precludes writing printer drivers...
Summary: Damn damn damn.
Message-ID: <12281@june.cs.washington.edu>
Date: 16 Jun 90 22:20:57 GMT
Sender: news@cs.washington.edu
Reply-To: wjs@fred.cs.washington.edu (William Shipley)
Organization: University of Washington Computer Science
Lines: 25

One obvious hack to do on the next is to use the built-in PostScript
interpreter as a nice general printer driver; for example allowing one
to hook up dot matrix or non-postscript lasers and do the PS imaging on
the NeXT.

Unfortunately, in the March 1990 NextAnswers, under postscript.312,
they explicitly say:

>The Adobe/NeXT licensing agreement says that you can only print images at
>resolutions greater than 150dpi on (ONLY on) the NeXT printer.  This allows
>us to create 92dpi bitmaps in our window server and print them, but not
>300 or 400dpi bitmaps (This is on page 6 of the license shipped with 1.0).

Bummer deal.  Assumedly, Adobe would sue anybody who tried to market
a product that dumped PS to arbitrary printers. (All isn't lost, tho, because
my AppleWriter is only 144dpi, so I could use it. Weee!)

Actually, it's an interesting issue whether they can sue you for selling
software that could be used to violate their licensing agreement, or
whether they'd have to sue the users who bought the software and prove
they actually used it.

I love lawyers.

-william shipley