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From: don@CS.UMD.EDU (Don Hopkins)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.news
Subject: sun's commitment to NeWS
Message-ID: <9003131357.AA12979@brillig.UMD.EDU>
Date: 13 Mar 90 13:59:07 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
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   Date: Tue, 13 Mar 90 08:46:35 -0500
   From: dwf@hope.ACL.LANL.GOV (David W. Forslund)

   I don't buy the idea by itself tht NeWS would be a success if Sun had
   given it away because a lot of people would work on it.  William Leler
   of Cogent Research offered a free version of NeWS called PIX a couple
   of years ago if some people would volunteer to enhance the graphics
   performance.  No one stepped forward, so we still have no free NeWS.

   Dave Forslund
   Los Alamos

As I understand it, PIX used the graphics library in NeWS 1.1
(cscript), but that could not be given away with PIX. If the NeWS 1.1
source code had been freely redistributable then there would have been
no need for someone to volunteer to write a PostScript graphics
library to go with PIX. PIX plus cscript or some other compatible
graphics library (like shapes in xnews) would be a nice workable
window system. The PIX PostScript interpreter has some enhancements
over the NeWS PostScript interpreter, but the hardest part of NeWS to
implement is the graphics library, not the interpreter.

	-Don