Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!decwrl!adobe!greid
From: greid@adobe.com (Glenn Reid)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.news
Subject: Re: NeWS and Display PostScript
Message-ID: <490@adobe.UUCP>
Date: 16 Feb 89 02:04:55 GMT
References: <890213-155306-7860@Xerox> <335@unicads.UUCP>
Sender: news@adobe.COM
Reply-To: greid@adobe.COM (Glenn Reid)
Organization: Adobe Systems Incorporated, Mountain View
Lines: 99

Sigh.  I guess I have to jump into this a little bit....

In article <335@unicads.UUCP> stefan@unicads.UUCP (Stefan) writes:
>In article <890213-155306-7860@Xerox>, "Michael_Powers.Henr801M"@XEROX.COM writes:
>> >If Adobe and Sun cannot come to some kind truce about PostScript and
>> >don't start working together, both NeWS and eventually PostScript will
>> >go down the drain.  This would be a damn shame.
>> 
>> I don't think that Sun and Adobe will be able to "work together" outright.
>> 
>> [some reasons why not...]
>>
>> Personally I agree that it would be nice to have Adobe and Sun working
>> together rather than playing these political olympics. But it just is not
>> going to happen with the current client of OSFism and the workstation war
>> that is heating up.
>> 
>> Mike Powers

I basically liked this message.  Our business is to make our customers
happy, whoever they may be.  We don't have the luxury of being able to
develop technology on the off chance that somebody within the user
community might use it, because (as it was pointed out) we are not
a hardware company.  We depend on people licensing the technology from
us.

> Sun has made a number of attempts to get Adobe to pull the NeWS wagon
> together with them. All seem to have been met with disdain (if not
> legal threats). [disclaimer here - I have no knowledge of any overtures
> made in the last 7-8 months].

Adobe has also made a number of attempts to get Sun to license Display
PsotScript from us, all of which have met with, well, non-action.  I
certainly wouldn't use a word like "disdain" without having been at the
meeting myself :-)  The disagreements hinge at least in part on the
controversy over source code.  Adobe is a system software technology
company, and Sun is a hardware and software company.  It would not make
sense for us to license something from them just to sell back to DEC :-)

> The problem lies not with Sun, but with Adobe. I think there is a 
> general perception at Sun that Adobe sees (saw?) NeWS as a threat to
> the future of PostScript (their lifeblood). When NeWS came along it
> represented a significant advance over "printer" PostScript. The
> extensions to PostScript that made it interactive seemed to set a
> whole new direction. 

Adobe is realistically not in a position to license NeWS, are they?  We
have a proprietary implementation of a PostScript interpreter dating
from 1985, and are well known as its inventor.  What would you have us
do differently?

Adobe has already licensed Display PostScript to IBM, DEC, NeXT, and
Sytex, and probably will license it to many more.  It is our own
technology and it is not positioned directly against NeWS.  NeWS is
different, and although we perhaps could have copied it, licensed it
from Sun, or been compatible with it in other ways, it would not have
met our customers' needs.  If it would have, our customers could have
used NeWS to begin with.  The incompatibilities are due to different
ideas as to how it should be done, and are not "deliberately" different
to force incompatibility.  That approach doesn't lend itself to good
technology, which is what we try to develop.

> That's the threat that Adobe perceives - the loss of the chance to
> guide the future direction of PostScript. I think it has little to
> do with OSF or their relationship to other companies (re Powers'
> comments). 

Adobe defined the PostScript language, and we will continue to do so.
So-called "clones" which implement additional verbs will always exist.
[And I'd rather not take a position on whether or not NeWS is a clone;
the statement is still generically true].  And new PostScript language
procedures can be defined at any moment, even by user-level programs.
Realistically, I don't think there is a threat to the future direction
of PostScript.  We are, naturally, worrying about the future direction
of our products.  PostScript is our product.  It is not like FORTRAN,
which is just a programming language that has many implementations.
[No flames about this, please].

> As long as NeWS is perceived by Adobe to threaten Adobe's control 
> of the future direction of PostScript they will continue to put
> it down (as non-conforming, etc.). I know it's bullshit but what
> can you do with small minds? 

We don't put NeWS down, we have just implemented a different strategy.
We do try to be careful about the terminology, and we don't like people
to call it "PostScript", because that is our registered trademark.  If
you call it NeWS and it works for you, then we are very happy with
that, because it indeed supports the spirit of the PostScript language.

Display PostScript is now a product.  NeWS is a product, I think.  They
are perhaps different solutions to the same problem, but they are not
compatible at the moment.  Of the two paths to compatibility, we would
simply like to see Sun license Display PostScript from us.

Of course, I hate to participate directly in these controversies, but I
do want our position to reasonably well understood.

Glenn Reid
Adobe Systems