[lug] WINE

[rm at fabula.de]

On Mon, Sep 09, 2002 at 06:04:45PM -0600, Matthew Snelham wrote:
> 
> 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.  

I'd second that. Gimp _is_ a viable alternative for screen design, but
for the prinbt market it's close to unusable.

> <Insert standardized rant about how those most one with the code
> are the least likely to conceive a decent UI>
> 
> 
> Who came blame a company for taking the low hanging fruit?

None. But sometimes there seem to be some political issues involved as well.
Let me bring up FrameMaker (my publishing tool of choise): there _was_ a 
working version of FM for linux available for approx. one year as a beta.
I had it running on my boxes and was really happy with it (just what i all-
ways wanted) and from the postings in their support groups i got the impression
that there where many feeling like me. I don't think there where ever any
technical reasons against selling the product (remember: FrameMaker has a 
strong Unix background) but the Linux port was dropped at the end of the 
testing year :-/ (Luckily, i can use my Mac version thanks to MacOnLinx and
Basilisk).

> 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.

Yes, but then it might be too late. (Linux) users don't forget as easily
and there might be a free product established by then. When Photoshop started
it wasn't as impressive as it is today and part of their success has to do
with the fact that users don't want to switch applications once they got
familiar with one tool. Even iff Photoshop is better, i can well imagine
that many Gimp-using screen designers won't change.

> [...] 
> 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>)

Ah, sigh. Have you ever read Quarks Developer Kit NDA ? I was literaly roling
on the floor, laughing ... ;-) 


 Ralf