"Freedom of choice is one of the great benefits of Open Source Software in general and Linux in particular. This freedom gives consumers the ability to select, without fear of litigation, what software they will use and how they will use or modify it. As a principal, this freedom is extremely valuable. However, a couple of announcements this week seem to indicate that market value of freedom of choice has dipped considerably. The biggest hurdle Linux adoption faced this week wasn't Microsoft, it was an enemy from within: Linux fragmentation."
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Member since:2005-09-01
Again, who is forcing them to support those distributions? pick two/three large distributions and only support those - problem solved.
For your engineers yes, for your sales, not really, definitely not for the users.
As for the spin offs; Enterprise Linux is directly derived from Fedora, and there are enterprise distributions that are direct pull downs of sources from Red Hat enterprise minus the branding.
Redhat actually managed build sort of an enterprise platform with RHEL. That's why it captures most of the commercial support support linux can get nowadays. Those clones are not really quite the same as derived distros.
The problem is also incompatibility beetween versions of single distro.
The reason why they don't port to Linux is simply this; if they ported their applications to Linux, they would be forced to compete head to head with opensource applications - people would be asking Adobe to justify $1399 on Creative Suite when a opensource tool chain of Gimp/Scribus/Quanta and the likes could achieve the same sorts of results.
That is what commercial application vendors are scared of - a group of users finally demanding that they justify their steep pricing for very marginal improvement over their opensource counter part - meaning, they would either have to dramatically improve their product OR lower their price.
Gimp is available for windows for some time. I don't know about Quanta and Scribus but they should arrive to Win32 world as soon as they are ported do KDE4. Generally most OSS worth a dime get ported sooner or later.
Oh pulease; Oracle have made major contributions to the Linux kernel to benefit their own applications;
Hey, Oracle is 800lb gorilla. A platform in itself. You can't compare that to an arbitrary gui app that is installed by a family man, not integrated by an army of dedicated engineers. Besides, Oracle also supports only a handful of enterprise distros.
there is nothing stopping Adobe from helping out with GTK/Cairo in respects to PDF implementation and scalable interface, and fixing any possible problems which they might find on their journeys.
Only that they have to do it >2 years in advance (compared to product shipping) and pray the changes will consistently make into majority of used distros (including LTS variants) by that time.
Don't blame the distro's if these software companies *CHOOSE* to be anti-social - all they have to do is sign up to the mailing list and air their dirty laundry if they want, they fact they choose to hide themselves in an ivory tower and bash organizations behind PR spokes people speaks volumes for the lack of back bone there of, that many of these software seem to lack.
Halleluyah, bro! Don't buy software from companies you consider evil.
I for one, would love not to have to use Windows. Unfortunately, linux community by not agreeing to provide a platform is giving in the field to MS through walkover.
Member since:
2005-07-06
Without knowing what "based" means in any case this really doesn't mean anything. Besides those three root distros are the types of "allways in flux" software that is an oxymoron of platform. The fact that they breed lots of spinoffs in based of various snapshots doesn't help a bit. Actually by lowering barrier for proliferation it actually worsens the fragmentation.
Again, who is forcing them to support those distributions? pick two/three large distributions and only support those - problem solved. As for the spin offs; Enterprise Linux is directly derived from Fedora, and there are enterprise distributions that are direct pull downs of sources from Red Hat enterprise minus the branding.
Still market for easily installed binary software exists on overpriced windows and not on free linux.
(by market share figures if linux was equivalent technically its market would exist in apriorately lower scale, but it doesn't).
The reason why they don't port to Linux is simply this; if they ported their applications to Linux, they would be forced to compete head to head with opensource applications - people would be asking Adobe to justify $1399 on Creative Suite when a opensource tool chain of Gimp/Scribus/Quanta and the likes could achieve the same sorts of results.
That is what commercial application vendors are scared of - a group of users finally demanding that they justify their steep pricing for very marginal improvement over their opensource counter part - meaning, they would either have to dramatically improve their product OR lower their price.
Why don't they have a problem on Windows? Because its easy, there is someone/something they can bash on a regular basis, Microsoft, who seems to be universally hatred amongst end users and allows the likes of Adobe and Symantec get away with murder - when all the shit hits the fan, who do the bash? easily, they bash Microsoft; when Microsoft proposes a superior replacement to PDF with more liberal licencing, who plays the victim game? Adobe. When Microsoft decides to lock vendors out of the kernel and provide interfaces for kernel monitoring functionality via a user space API (Defender API) rather than requiring a kernel driver to be loaded, who starts to spread lies and half truths about it? Symantec.
These software vendors *NEED* Microsoft because it provides them with a whipping boy when all things go down the gurgler - perish the thought of them actually having to stand behind their product and the decisions they made when writing it!
They have flexibility but not dependablity. They can contribute whatever they want but they can't influence in what shape their contribution find their way to final products (distros). And they can't fight fragmentation. MS at least gives them roadmaps, announces its (arbitrary, true) decisions in advance and sells tools that produce code that works on it's systems.
Oh pulease; Oracle have made major contributions to the Linux kernel to benefit their own applications; there is nothing stopping Adobe from helping out with GTK/Cairo in respects to PDF implementation and scalable interface, and fixing any possible problems which they might find on their journeys.
I am sure that the Fedora community wouldn't mind Adobe or Corel contributing to Fedora's development by providing new libraries that are licenced under acceptable terms.
Don't blame the distro's if these software companies *CHOOSE* to be anti-social - all they have to do is sign up to the mailing list and air their dirty laundry if they want, they fact they choose to hide themselves in an ivory tower and bash organisations behind PR spokes people speaks volumes for the lack of back bone there of, that many of these software seem to lack.