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I worked with Apple to get Cyberdog opensourced. One of the hangups was the freaking GIF patent. Damn Compuserve. Never ended up happening.

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(author) Excellent! A valiant effort. What were the other hangups? Was there any third-party code present?

Yes, and that was another issue, but they didn’t seem too worried about that at the time, though I can’t rule that out as a blocker.

I see Kantara in your bio. Anything interesting there at the time, other than things like PartBank?

I’m surprised I have Kantara listed anywhere, lol.

I had a few utilities. A window manager, for example. And PartBank was the registry and online store for software. Important, because if you open the document and you are missing software, it was impossible to view. But since I had a registry of viewers and how to install them, it solved a few problems. I spoke at WWDC and MacWorld about these things. This was the App Store I wanted bundled into the OS.

I had another utility called Kantara Internet Search Service (KISS). My young baby self had gotten a deal to sell 1 million copies of it to Apple to include on the install for education. Steve Jobs killed that deal too. Sigh.

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