Foundation controversy.

[Garance A Drosehn]

gad> Does this mean, that OmniWeb 2.0 will need the Foundation
gad> stuff too?  Bad news for a user working (still) with NS 3.0.

> Yes, it is bad news, and I'm sorry.

First off, let me say that I can understand the advantages of
going with the Foundation classes -- particularly with OpenStep
right around the corner.

> I know a lot of people are stuck at Universities where they can't
> get the funding for upgrades, and I feel bad for those people,
> but I can't justify staying in the past because of that.  The
> truth of the matter is that the majority of sites I know that
> aren't upgrading are either sites that have no money to spend on
> NEXTSTEP, or have decided to phase out NEXTSTEP.

Note that some people may be sticking with NS-3.2 for reasons that
have nothing much to do with NeXT's upgrade costs.  For instance,
I pretty much have to stick with NS-3.2 on my NeXT machine because
AFS (file system from Transarc) isn't supported for NS-3.3.  I
can't afford to lose AFS support (which gets me access to over 100
gigabytes of campus disk space) for any of the benefits of NS-3.3.

That said, I also can't run AFS on my NS/Intel machine, so I've
got NS-3.3 running there.  The new OmniPDF seems to work nice, I'm
very happy to see something like this available.  With OpenStep
for non-NeXTSTEP platforms less than a year away (I hope!!), I
understand that the sensible choice was to use the foundation
classes where appropriate.

What would be nice is if NeXT could make the necessarily libraries
available for a pretty cheap price (I'm assuming that installing
the libraries wouldn't break anything for someone like me, it'd
just add support for foundation apps).  I don't know how well that
would work for earlier systems (NS-3.0), but in any case it's clear
that we're going to be seeing OpenStep applications which will run
on NS-3.3 but won't run on earlier system releases.  People running
the earlier system releases better start planning for that fact
very soon now, and not bother beating up on the first apps which
happen to make that requirement clear.

[and as for me, I do already have NS-3.3 for this machine anyway,
mainly for the improved Mail.app.  Maybe I should see if I can
install the foundation libraries but keep the rest of my machine
at NS-3.2...]

---
Garance Alistair Drosehn     =     gad at eclipse.its.rpi.edu
ITS Systems Programmer            (handles NeXT-type mail)
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute;           Troy NY    USA