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From: ts@cup.portal.com (Tim W Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: System 7.0 and MacDTS policies
Message-ID: <31279@cup.portal.com>
Date: 30 Jun 90 08:25:26 GMT
References: <1990Jun21.215639.16938@efi.com> <8842@goofy.Apple.COM>
  <1990Jun25.223451.2864@efi.com> <42340@apple.Apple.COM>
  <1990Jun26.192623.7121@efi.com> <26883CF9.2BCB@intercon.com>
  <1990Jun28.182240.17652@efi.com>
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 26

< bother with the MacDTS line at all?  Does anyone have any good
< experiences to report with it?

I recently asked a question and in response DTS sent me a think package
full of documents marked "FOR INTERNAL APPLE USE ONLY" and a diskette
of sample code.  This stuff will save about four months of work on a
big project I'm working on.  I think this qualifies as a good
experience.

Most of my bad experiences with DTS can be explained by a lack of
understanding on the part of the question screener.  For example,
let's say you wanted to make a Macintosh CD-ROM drive.  Your first
question is probably something like, "Can I just license the Apple
CD-ROM stuff and have it work with my drive, or do I have to write
my own driver which the Apple CD-ROM stuff can use, or do I have
to write my own external file system to use this?".

The problem here is that when you send this question, the screener
will look at this and see that you mentioned licensing Apple's CD-ROM
stuff, and send you a letter saying DTS does not deal with licensing
issues and directing you to the licensing people.

Now that I've found out that someone who is not highly technical screens
the questions, I can phrase them in such a way as to avoid having them
misdirected.  I suspect that this knowledge will eliminate the few
cases where my questions get bounced.