#SEYBOLD
I think your rose colored glasses are clouding your vision:
John was the guy who first put PostScript in the public domain, and then,
several years and several hundred million dollars later, tried to take it
back, and finally settled for some goofy free licensing agreement with
either very odd or very sinister intentions.
He was also the guy who copy-protected Adobe fonts to the printer ROM, so
you couldn't output on someone else's printer or take yours in for service.
Later he charged $40 per set to unprotect them.
As for his indignation and surpise over the Apple/MS agreement, I hardly
think it's real or warranted. Apple has talked about their open standards
since last year and Adobe hasn't moved to address those concerns, even
after others had cracked Type I. Now that he has reneged on his promise to
convert the Adobe library to Royal, Adobe's future has dimmed even further.
Quite a rhetorical feat, by the way, to turn John's newly broken promise
into an example of Apple's "playing dirty." What promise did Apple break?
Apple licensed those fonts from Adobe. Apple was the first mass-market
implementer of SCSI and, yes, strayed a bit but have come back in line with
emerging standards. You seem quite forgiving, on the other hand of
Illustrator's rather comical incompatibility with ATM. Oh, and remember
NFNTs? the format Adobe waited until the last possible minute to support,
depsite rampant font ID conflicts? Remember Illustrator's odd
incompatibilites with Jasmine hard drives? Sigma displays? It's intentional
incompatibility with the GCC Laser Printer and other QuickDraw-based
printers? And there is nothing particularly odd about Apple's video. It's
quite nice, actually.
The Bauer clone that Apple has gotten from Microsoft is compatible with (a
superset of) Postscript – and if Adobe opens it up in '90, there is no
reason to think Apple will diverge from Postscript.
I love Illustrator and outline fonts…but I won't miss Adobe's prices or
attitude. The bottom line is: when Apple and Microsoft and IBM get behind
something, it's going to happen. Adobe should quit mourning the death of
the golden goose and become the world's best type vendor. The market just
quadrupled in size – they could own it.