On the commercial vs freebie side, I've very happy to buy MetaCard
because their prices are reasonable. But if its going to be a big
success (as it deserves), more publicity seems to be needed, pushing
the you-too-can-move-Mac-stuff-to-network line - and in colour... :)
To help this, many more demos are needed: if people can see what it can
do, then they'll buy it (or get site licences.
I think MetaCard was diametrically wrong in pitching the first
versions at programmers. What you need is the naive user market -
those moving up from Macs to networks, who are not averse to seeing
their applications running on the network, and accessingf them from a
Mac via Mac-X. For the programmers, pitch more strongly on the
look-how-well-this-works-with-C/Motif angle?
Suggestion: prepare a CDROM of MetaCard, with demo applications,
and perhaps get Walnut creek or some such to market it?
best wishes,
Michael Greenhalgh
Australian National University
PS might the demos include some kind of interactivity with XMosaic,
which is a great HTML interface, but lacks much of the flexibility
of MetaCard? Or am I off-target here?