On Friday, October 08, 2010 23:55:07 Warren Young wrote:
> I think the explanation is different: they tried for a few years to drum
> up support for FB on Linux, too few customers showed up, so they decided
> to refocus on the two platforms that do make them money.
>
> Y'all may recall a different example: Word Perfect was also once offered
> on Linux for about a year, then pulled. OpenOffice wasn't even around
> at the time, so you can't blame competition. Corel had a near open
> field to play in, and still couldn't make a buck.
Well, I can add that Wolfram Mathematica has supported Linux since kernel 2.4
days, and still does it. I don't see it backing up because of profit shortage,
on the contrary.
Another example are the graphics hardware vendors. Both ATI and nVidia do offer
support for Linux platforms with their proprietary drivers. They certainly
don't find the Linux market profitless.
Yet another example is skype, a typical desktop app. They also successfully
offer a Linux version, and don't complain about lack of market.
The list goes on... :-)
I don't believe that profit is the reason why Adobe and others don't offer a
Linux version of their products. I would rather say it is incompetence to
maintain the code that is portable across OS's. And that says something about
the quality of their products and skill level of their programmers, IMNSHO. I
think Linux community is actually better off not using any of that crap
software, if possible (I wonder why flash player comes to my mind right
now...).
If their software had been designed and implemented in a way one would expect
from a high-class professional commercial company, they would certainly have
next to zero problems porting it to Linux and gaining additional market (no
matter how slightly bigger, it's bigger nevertheless, and every buck counts).
The fact they don't do it shows that they find it hard to maintain their code
for a Linux platform. And that is a consequence of bad design and/or
implementation of their software, not lack of market.
<rant>
IOW, Adobe is a bunch of incompetent fools producing second grade low quality
pos-software that cannot run correctly on Linux because it is coded so badly
that even my grandma would code it better. And my grandma has no experience in
programming at all. I'm actually quite baffled how they manage to produce
working versions of their products for OS X. That is, _if_ they support Mac at
all.
</rant>
However, if you want/need to use their pos-software, I agree you are better off
with a Mac than with a Windows PC. Pos-software running on a decent OS is
still better than pos-software running on a pos-OS. :-)
Best, :-)
Marko
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