[Desktop_architects] The reason Adobe does not want to port Photoshop?

Kevin Krammer kevin.krammer at gmx.at
Thu Oct 12 02:42:16 PDT 2006


On Thursday 12 October 2006 00:03, Jeremy White wrote:
> > Judging by the developer's comments it is more likely intentionally
> > spreading misinformation.
> >
> > However, my experience with corporate developers, even a couple of those
> > I know personally, is that they are quite undereducated regarding the
> > state of Linux/free software desktops.
>
> I disagree, and I disagree pretty violently, at least for
> the perspective of a typical ISV.  (I won't speak to in house corporate
> developers, I do agree that they may well be undereducated as to
> the role that the Linux Desktop could play in their organizations).

I probably should have used markup: I was talking about *my* experience, which 
either means developers I know directly or about what they tell me about 
co-workers.

Second English isn't my native language so undereducated might have been the 
wrong word. I meant that they knowlegde is quite limited, but I didn't mean 
to imply that it is either their fault or that they are stupid.

At the company I am working for we do cross-platform applications including 
GUI and I consider myself undereducated on Windows related things, but I 
wouldn't consider ranting about how weird it is to develop on Windows, just 
because my Unix/Linux related knowledge cannot be directly applied.

Yet this is very often (definitely not always) the case the other way around 
and my, sorry *my*, assumption is that rather missing information about the 
other architecture than a problem of the architecture itself.

> I think that most Linux developers and advocates have a rose colored view
> of what the Linux development process and market really is, at least for a
> an ISV that wants to create a Desktop application for sale.

I agree that this is making things worse, but requiring everthing to be 
structured like on Windows doesn't help either.

> Another great read, along those lines, is the experience of the Flash team:
>   http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/
>
> As far as I can tell, the Adobe Linux Flash team is a bunch of
> competent developers, working their hearts out to do a port to Linux.
> And their blog reads like people riding across the wild west,
> harried by wild animals (read:  "Linux Zealots") along the way.

I absolutely agree. Actually I think appreciate this developer's approach, 
i.e. actively acquiring knowledge from outside, even if the implementation 
(comments on a blog) is making it rather difficult to extract the valuable 
information from between the zealot postings.

> I wrote a much longer rant, and then deleted it; I think that
> blog contains enough food for thought by itself.

Ah, bummer, I like reading your rants :)

> But my summary was this:
>
>    It takes a lot of hard work to create a Desktop product for Linux
>    The Linux Desktop Market, such as it is, is tiny
>    Even worse, that market is highly fragmented
>      (Yes, it really does matter to an ISV that there is
>      Ubuntu, Red Hat, SuSE, and on and on; yes, they are
>      'close', but this isn't horseshoes).
>    It's virtually impossible to do a credible QA job
>      on a Linux Desktop product, because there are too many
>      different configurations of Linux 'in the wild'.
>    Similarly, it's very difficult to provide credible customer
>      support to the Linux Desktop market.

If I understand correctly the main problem is not the development itself but 
rather issues around deployment, correct?

>    And all that for a market full of people who would really rather
>      your product was Free, and in the final analysis, are rather
>      reluctant to part with cold, hard, cash.

I disagree on this one. The all-for-free concept is pretty much the current 
consumer mantra, the people who are part of the Linux market are just more 
vocal, people from other markets just pirate silently.

> So I think it's wrong to call Adobe programmers 'undereducated' -
> they're telling it like it is.  And the sooner we face that truth
> and get on with doing what we can to improve the situation (yay for
> xdg-utils!), the better.

The positive side from my perspective is that they are now starting to tell us 
about their point of view. It's pretty frustrating to develop base 
infrastructure without any ISV feedback.
With the notable exception of CodeWeavers of course!

If they don't want to talk to us, they should at least talk to OSDL and let 
them relay it to us after anonymising it.

Cheers,
Kevin

-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer
Portland Project developer
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