CompuServe Messages

Sounds like fun. I eagerly await what CBM has to say about this. Do you know who in CBM is working on this? After seeing how Windows and the Mac reacted to embedding technology, I'm still ambivalent about it, although I do think it's going to take over the world. It offers a two-edged sword to developers, I think… on one hand, smaller companies will get the opportunity to make embedders for larger products. On the other, companies like Microsoft will become more successful because their "products" become reduced to nothing more than glorified hosts for embedding. It raises a lot of questions. For example, if someone hands out a document that should contain embedded fonts, does the other person get the right to use that font? If someone's document requires a player, do they get the player, too? Will consumers regard players and embedders as real software, and be more likely to pirate them when they don't realize? So when I write InterChange converters as class libraries, then everyone will be able to pirate them and use them in other applications, right, because stealing a library isn't really like stealing software, huh? 🙂 Don't you think it would be more likely for someone to pirate ImageMaster and its neat new datatypes loaders and savers, if they owned a competing product that would use them? What if Art Dept could suddenly use all your loaders and savers? Or if I made a TIO converter for the Toaster that could use all your existing PI modules? Yeah, pirates is pirates and they'll steal anything… but interoperability makes it so much easier and more "productive".