Re: Another Take

From Wikipedia on the History of Final Cut Pro.

Ubillos' group was hired by Macromedia to create KeyGrip, built from the ground up as a more professional video-editing program based on Apple QuickTime. Macromedia could not release the product without causing its partner Truevision some issues with Microsoft, as KeyGrip was, in part, based on technology from Microsoft licensed to Truevision and then in turn to Macromedia. The terms of the IP licensing deal stated that it was not to be used in conjunction with QuickTime. Thus, Macromedia was forced to keep the product off the market until a solution could be found
. . .
Final Cut was shown in private room demonstrations as a 0.9 alpha at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) exposition in 1998 after Macromedia pulled out of the main show floor. At the demonstration, both Mac and Windows versions were shown. The Mac version was working with a Truevision RTX dual stream real time card with limited real time effects. When no purchaser could be found, Apple purchased the team as a defensive move. When Apple could not find a buyer in turn, it continued development work


I also think it's possible there may be licensing, patent, contractual issues. The cost of renewal of the agreements might have been much higher given the increased value FCP achieved.

Now we have

Ability to buy FCP7 licenses for enterprise deployments coming in the next few weeks…

Changing to

Although industry professional Sam Johnson (via alex4d) originally claimed that Apple would definitely resume licenses "in the next few weeks," company representatives quickly contacted him to set the record straight, saying it is only "looking into" the possibility at this stage. Blogger Peter Wiggins has noted that Apple's issue is a legal one.

That Apple has to "look into" something, that there is a legal issue, that from the announced the said "in a few weeks." Sure does look like Apple has to renegotiate something.

It's even possible they were negotiating to a very late stage and may not have intended on pushing FCS2009 off the market.

Apple has a history of long transitions.
OS9 to OSX and it took 17 months to go from Cheetah to Puma to Jaguar which was finally somewhat usable.
PPC to Intel from WWDC announcement to completion was about 14 months.
QuickTime 7 to QuickTime X about 2 years and counting.

Apple's history is long technological transitions and the above also included FCP. So why is FCP7 to FCPX the exception? I can't help but think there was a legal/licensing issue involved.