RE: FREE SPEECH & SOFTWARE
RE: FREE SPEECH & SOFTWARE
Sent: 6/12/96; 11:21:32 PM
From: tom@newts.com (Tom Collins)
> What about free speech for software writers? Is it guaranteed? If a > platform vendor tells people not to use my product, are they > interfering with my right to free speech? How do laws about fair > competition apply to software platforms?
This little tidbit touched a nerve... I've followed your trials and tribulations with Frontier and would like to share an experience my partner and I ran into involving Apple.
My partner, Dan, started writing software for the Newton MessagePad in early 1994. We released a few shareware titles and did very well. One title in particular, NewtCase, did so well we found someone to publish it commercially. It was a popular product because it addressed a major problem of the early Newtons -- limited heap space. It used undocumented system calls, but it was a very stable product.
Before going commercial, I got a few e-mails from users saying that SOS-APPL has blamed NewtCase for problems they (the users) were having. Saying that it was an evil app, poorly written, and was dangerous to use. Our loyal users didn't listen, but I wondered how many people had stopped using the product as a result of Apple's recommendations.
So I posted a public message to the Newton newsgroups, asking for people to share any stories of SOS-APPL bad-mouthing our product. Within a day, I got a message from an Important Person of some sort in the PowerBook division of SOS-APPL, who took care of the problem, stating that we wouldn't have to worry about it happening again.
Then, a few months after we published our commercial utility suite, Apple comes out with their own version of our product (published as Newton Utilities under their StarCore label), which made use of the same undocumented system calls that we had gotten in trouble for using. Unbelievable.
So, Dave, stay strong and keep on fighting. Frontier is a superior product (although I admit I haven't had the opportunity to use it since v3.0) and will live on. I've kept a Guy Kawasaki quote that helped me get through the "Newton Utilties" days: "It's very easy to understand why a developer would get paranoid when Apple decides to create a competing product. But in most cases, Apple's product is usually inferior to a third-party product. What Apple does is validate the market."
In our case, Newton Utilties wasn't updated when the Newton 2.0 OS was released. Our product won. I only hope that people will take the time to realize how great Frontier is, instead of using AppleScript because it's included with the OS.
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