See? Making noise really can make a difference. MacInTouch reports that, following the massively negative feedback about Apple's Quicktime 3 licensing scheme, Apple plans to revise the Software Distribution Agreement to make the terms a little more palatable for licensees and end-users alike. A letter from Apple's Quicktime Evangelist outlines the coming changes to the agreement, due by the end of the month.

Originally, the Quicktime distribution license required that developers pay $1 per copy to include the Quicktime installer with their software. For developers who wanted or needed to waive that fee, there was the option of making their application place a "Get Quicktime Pro" ad movie on the end-user's desktop every time the application was run. This was universally decried as ridiculously restrictive and almost spam-like, by developers and users alike. Happily, Apple's regained their senses and the new agreement will require only that the application's installer run the Quicktime 3 installer, which will place the ad on the user's desktop.

Developers can continue to pay $1 per copy and instead include a Quicktime 3 installer that doesn't install the ad; they can also pay $2 per copy and install Quicktime Pro. Suddenly, the options make much more sense, and we're glad that Apple isn't oblivious to universal outrage.

It's funny where little facts can leak out. Mac OS Rumors reports that Apple's web page listing Worldwide Developer Conference courses contains some interesting references to something called "Mac OS 2000," which Rumors suggests refers to the product of the operating system convergence project. (The page they link to contained no such references when we checked it out; presumably someone realized that said info wasn't supposed to be made public just yet and yanked it.)

As for "OS convergence," that's a phrase that Rumors has been bandying about for a while, referring to the way that Mac OS and Rhapsody are growing together, and will eventually become one operating system code base serving different needs on different platforms. Such a strategy allows one version of the OS tuned for server use, another for desktop clients, another for handhelds, etc. with all OSes derived from the same code base, making development more uniform and feature progression more aligned. Whether or not this will actually be Apple's strategy should become clear during this week's WWDC.

While we at AtAT are intrigued by this operating system for the next millenium, we are not thrilled at the prospect of Apple adopting a Microsoft-like versioning scheme, and we hope that "Mac OS 2000" is just a working title. But given that Apple adopted Microsoft's technical support pricing structure (and even referred to their new system as "Microsoft-like" in their press releases), we wouldn't be terribly surprised to find more and more Microsoftian things creeping slowly into the Apple way. Is it a gradual and insidious assimilation?

Sometimes it's all in the way you spin things, and Microsoft is the uncontested master of shameless positive spin. The most recent example may be the FrontPage 98 bug which allows a user to delete his or her entire hard disk from within the FrontPage program itself; Microsoft has seen fit to describe this behavior as a "feature." CNET has details.

The specific situation that can cause this behavior involves designating the "web" directory in FrontPage to be an entire hard disk, and then deleting that folder. The reason that FrontPage lets you such a strange thing is because, according to FrontPage program manager Mike Angiulo, users might actually want to use a complete hard disk for nothing but the web site they're developing. Therefore, the ability to designate a hard disk as your web folder (and even to delete it) is a feature and not a bug. Sounds almost plausible, doesn't it? Of course, it doesn't explain why FrontPage will delete files that are obviously not web files without asking twice, but hey, this is Microsoft logic we're dealing with, here.

If this sort of careless deletion of files from within a Microsoft application seems familiar, you may be thinking of the recent Microsoft Office 98 problem, in which the Remove Office 98 application blithely assumes that whatever folder containing a specific shared library must be the Office 98 folder-- so if that file somehow got moved to the System Folder, running the Remove Office 98 program would trash the system software. That bug was fixed shortly after it was discovered, though we're pretty sure even Microsoft couldn't call that bug a "feature" and keep a straight face. What we want to know is, why can't the world's biggest and most successful software company develop enough attention to detail in their applications to, say, check to make sure that files about to be deleted are not system files? Another puzzler for the ages.