[lug] WINE

[Matthew Snelham]

On 09 Sep 2002 04:02 PM or thereabouts, William D. Knoche wrote:
> Gimp is actually a very good replacement for Photoshop though I miss the
> history palette. One can argue that gimp has better plugins... and the
> learning curve is pretty shallow since it looks/acts a lot like
> photoshop.

I think that's very generous.  Gimp is a powerful tool, but it's not in the
same class.   There are a lot of patent issues around color correction and
publishing which I hope gimp gets a chance to fix, but a lot of the
disparity is in the UI.  Gimp is just not as polished.  

<Insert standardized rant about how those most one with the code
are the least likely to conceive a decent UI>

> I don't think this is a technical issue.
> Marketing! Installed base...
> 
> Seriously, a lot of ISVs build their applications on M$ purely on the
> strength of the installed base - they hate it but they make money. They
> build their support platforms by rank stacking the installed base of
> potential customer's platforms.

Exactly.  Development and Support are expensive, even when you have full 
economies of scale working for you... and when you don't...

Who came blame a company for taking the low hanging fruit?

Adobe has tried selling their products on a secondary platform (Solaris)
before and was rather discouraged by selling roughly 2 copies (okay, maybe
3).  Once burned, twice shy.  Which, besides the CEO's frothing dislike of
the Open Source community, is probably the reason Adobe has ignored the
Linux market thus far.

But critical mass is building.

> Still, I think if everyone keeps pounding on Adobe, Intuit, etc to port
> to Linux it could happen. I personally call Intuit and aks about Linux
> once per month. Adobe called to ask when I was going to upgrade Photoshop
> from 6.0 to 7.0 and I said as soon as they had a Linux version, if not I
> would live with gimp.

Photoshop for Linux, _native_ to Linux, has existed for some time.  Roughly
two years that I'm aware of, with varying feature sets and levels of
stability.  I've been told the Linux Photoshop tree was an underground
project to begin with, and is now maintained for much the same reasons as
Apple's maintinance of an x86 port of OS X. 

This February, a client let me install and play with an 'official' set of
Photoshop 8.0 alpha Linux binaries that they had been given under NDA.  (My
NDA only prohibits me from saying who the client is, <sigh>)

It was more stable than the old Solaris port (okay, so that's not saying a
whole lot), and they couldn't seem to decide between WM managed windows and
an MDI window environment...  but it was otherwise full featured.  Best of
all, a team at Adobe was actively accepting bug reports for it from the
client.  I don't know anything for certian, but most companies don't go to
that trouble unless they're planning a release.

> If enough people ask...

... and then: If enough people pay... ;-)

--Matthew
infinite at sigalrm.com

--
   "Besides, everyone knows that waiters/waitresses only seem so
    abnormally sexy because they bring us nice things to eat. If
    they were doing your taxes you wouldn't look at them twice."