> I wonder why Adobe don't produce Photoshop for Linux? Bet a deal was
> done somewhere so it will only run on Windoz/Mac......

If you buy a copy, you can run it wherever you want. We only test it on
PowerPC-based Mac OSX and x86-based Windows, but if you've got a machine
that can run software for one of those two environments (say Linux plus WINE
or whatever), you're free to do so. We're unlikely to fix any bugs that
don't also occur on the "real" OS, and I don't know what the phone support
policy is. But we don't do anything to keep it from running on such
platforms.

Why doesn't Adobe develop Photoshop for Linux? Well, let's see -- a platform
with negligible market share among mainstream users of our product, whose
main attraction is that most of the software is cheap or free. Neither
marketing nor the finance people have been beating on the engineering
department's doors about that one for some reason.

Photoshop 3 ran on several flavors of Unix, back when high end Unix boxes
were many times faster than commodity x86 boxes. It didn't sell well enough
to justify continuing it. The cheap hardware choice is now also the fast
hardware choice, and the price difference to customers between Windows and
Linux as a percentage of the overall cost of a system running Photoshop is
small, which is one reason why the vast majority of the market doesn't run
Linux.

And has been noted, people have already gotten Photoshop running on Linux
under Windows emulators -- more power to 'em. That gives Adobe even less
incentive to spend the big bucks and engineering time (it would come out of
the engineering time we could otherwise spend on adding features or
improving performance) it takes to support another platform. (And I haven't
even started on the question of "which graphics / windowing / toolbox API on
top of Linux"?)

Russell Williams
Not speaking for Adobe Systems

===============================================================
GO TO http://www.prodig.org for ~ GUIDELINES ~ un/SUBSCRIBING ~ ITEMS for SALE

Reply via email to