To: dj@toaster, newstech, wert@toaster, vikas@Eng, milind@Eng, jag,
	paolo@Eng, recker@Eng, jdn@Eng, opcode@Eng, lien@Eng,
	maynard@Eng, sevans@Eng, leo@glop, chuck.price@Eng, flar@Eng
In-reply-to: Deron Dann Johnson's message of Tue, 4 Jun 91 09:32:46 PDT <9106041632.AA01355@sunhigh.Eng.Sun.COM>
Subject: a story
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> From: dj@sunhigh (Deron Dann Johnson)

> My personal feeling is that Sun needs to have a story when an ISV
> wants to port an existing DPS application to OpenWindows which is
> better than saying simply saying "convert it to NeWS."   How this 
> is achieved is not within my domain of expertise.  

I have very strong personal feelings on this matter, having worked
full time, consulted, and volunteered my time to more than a few
"ISV's" (or whatever you call them), developing software for NeWS.

Judging from my past experiences and the experiences of many of my
friends who have worked in the field, Sun has *always* had a story to
tell people who want to develop software for NeWS. And that's all it's
ever been: a story.  Time and time again we have been told that Sun
has finally gotten its shit together and is now really 100% totally
behind NeWS.

Recently I was asked to attend a demonstration given by a professor
from Rochester of a delightful CAD system written in the NeWS toolkit.
This long time loyal NeWS software developer was visiting Sun to
decide if he should lay it all on the line, and incorporate a company
to develop and market his CAD system using the NeWS toolkit.

He knew all about Sun's story. Year after year he went back to his
university, repeating that story, and they laughed at him for
believing it. But he stuck with NeWS, and now he's got an excellent
unique marketable application to show for it, to demonstate to us, and
to sell. 

But this time I was in the room too, and we all heard the same old
story.  He said we weren't telling him anything he hadn't
heard before, and we all knew exactly what he meant.  We all admitted
he would've been right to give up, all those times before; but the
only thing that could *possibly* be worse than that, would be for him
to give up *this* time, after *never* giving up before, because *this*
time it was for real, we *are* shipping a stable high quality product,
which we *will* support and promote, and the high level executives at
Sun are *all* totally committed to NeWS.

I sure wanted to believe that argument, and I know he did, too. I
don't know what came of the meeting, and I don't know what to believe,
but I do know that Sun had better start living up to its story about
commitment to NeWS before we start making up stories about how we'll
treat vendors porting to Display PostScript. We should tell those
vendors the same story we've always told NeWS vendors, then we should
do all we can to help them port their applications to NeWS. Our
cooperation with Frame and Turing are excellent examples, and the
results have been fabulous, something to be shown to vendors who think
they want Display PostScript.  But we could still ruin them, in spite
of all the work they've done, if we repeat what we've done so many
times before. If we screw them with NeWS, we'll screw them with
Display PostScript.

	-Don