At some point I thought NeWS source was released. Is it just another
Lost Source or it is out there somewhere?
As I have said in other replies: "simple economics always beats sophisticated architecture."
I personally never saw the code, although I did play with the result at one point. I believe they licensed Adobe Display PostScript which was one of the issues. IIRC was also a trigger for creating Ghostscript. We toyed with using it for Stellar. IIRC, Andy Van Dam was a big fan.
Do I remember right that it was a Gosling effort?
Yep.
Like BLISS vs. C - NeWS did way more than X11 did when it first appeared and it might have had a chance if Sun had not locked it up the same way DEC did with BLISS. Funny, they gave away NFS and basically set a standard that they controlled. I have to believe they made way more money selling systems because NFS was ubiquitous than they would have with license revenue for NFS.
I suspect NeWS was justified internally differently and the marketing types saw it as a revenue stream. Larry, can you enlighten us at all?