Foundation controversy.

[Andrew Abernathy]

Armin Retzko <armin at schwarz.kd.fh-hannover.de> writes:

> Then why is there no "runtime" for this Foundation stuff? Why do  
i have to
> buy (as a user) a complete OS Upgrade or a software developer  
tool (EOF)?

Well, there are a few issues involved that I can think of, but I  
suspect that it
really comes down to the fact that the big corporate customers, which are
NeXT's focus now, were willing to (and did) pay tons of money for those
runtimes, and would probably be ticked off if NeXT then started  
giving out
those runtimes for free.

In a way, Foundation is as liberating as a real solution to the memory
addressing problems that people had with older versions of Windows.
Few NeXT developers have the resources to provide two seriously
different (internally) versions of the same app, and quite honestly, the
market isn't there, either.  Look at PDFViewer and OmniWeb - Omni
only makes money off of sites that need multiple licenses of these, and
pretty much all those sites have paid for Foundation.  In fact, most
single users have upgraded to 3.3 User.

There's a much bigger gap with 3.3 Developer - I get the impression
that tons of people decided they couldn't justify the upgrade cost to
3.3 Developer (~$750 upgrade for the first month, then ~$1250).  I
think a lot of people, including at least a number of the big sites, just
got EOF - that gets you Foundation (slightly newer than Foundation
in 3.3, in fact), and, of course, EOF, which is the thing that the big
sites really wanted anyway.

Hey, if it helps, the changes to 3.3 Mail are worth a decent chunk of
change in themselves.

> PS: The NeXT Third Party Software Catalog (Spring or Winter '93)  
says that
>
>     Diagram and other Lighthouse Apps use the Foundation Classes.
>     But that was even before NS 3.2 was in the press.
>     Why did those apps run on NS 3.0 or 3.1?

Different Foundation - those were internal classes written by Lighthouse
for their own use, which they then productized.  NeXT's Foundation is
a different "product."

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