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Better Late Than Never (6/20/98)
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For those of you remember the hullabaloo surrounding Apple's new distribution license when QuickTime 3 came out a few months ago, you should be pleased to note that Apple's finally posted a revised license, as promised, incorporating changes demanded by the developer community. Over a month ago, Apple promised that a new license would be delivered by the end of May. They missed that self-imposed deadline by a couple of weeks, but the license finally surfaced last week.
If you weren't following the uproar at the time, Apple's original QuickTime 3 distribution license required that developers pay $1 per copy of their application if they chose to ship it with the QuickTime installers. Since previous versions of QuickTime were free to distribute, the price hike had a lot of small developers over a barrel. There was a way to waive the $1 fee-- but it involved making one's application install the "Get QuickTime Pro" ad movie on the user's desktop every time the program was run. Many developers considered that no choice at all-- either raise the cost of their applications, or annoy the living bejeezus out of their users. The revised license is significantly less painful; the free version of the QuickTime installer now only shows the QuickTime Pro ad once during installation, and if the user trashes the ad on the Desktop, it's gone for good. MacWEEK has a nice overview of the options available to developers.
First Apple announces Mac OS X in response to developers' overwhelming resistance to rewriting their applications in a different language using a completely set of API's, and now they post a revised QuickTime license that addresses the main complaints that developers raised. An Apple that actually listens to developers' complaints! Goodness gracious, what's next-- revised membership pricing for the Apple Developers' Program? (Don't hold your breath.)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 6/20/98 episode: June 20, 1998: Apple arrives late to the party, but makes good on its promise to revamp the QuickTime distribution license. Meanwhile, UserLand starts charging-- a lot-- for its Frontier scripting environment, and if you thought PowerBook G3's are hard to find, a group of armed burglars in Canada found a way to get their hands on some (though we can't approve of their methods)...
Other scenes from that episode: 792: $: The New Frontier (6/20/98) In other price hike news, UserLand's Frontier is joining the world of commercial software. Frontier is a popular and powerful scripting environment that, until now, has been free of charge. Unfortunately for its users, MacInTouch points out that its new pricing structure means that Frontierheads are going to have to pony up at least $300 a year to use the new 5.1 version... 793: Think Larceny (6/20/98) Hands up-- your Mac or your life! A MacCentral report confirms a long-held axiom in the computer world-- thieves prefer Macs. In a frightening turn of events, several armed burglars threatened an Apple Canada security guard at gunpoint and robbed the building of about $100,000 worth of Mac equipment...
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