Slashdot Mirror
Adobe Forming a Linux Strategy?
rocketjam writes "According to cnet, Adobe Systems, the 800-pound gorilla of commercial graphics software is looking to become more involved with desktop Linux. The company has recently posted two new jobs, one for a director of Linux market development to 'identify and evaluate strategies for Adobe in the Linux and open-source desktop market', and one for a senior computer scientist who will 'become maintainer and/or architect for one or more Adobe-sponsored open-source projects.' Additionally, Adobe has joined the Open Source Development Labs and is active in the desktop Linux working group. A company spokesman said they are not currently looking to port any of their flagship products such as Photoshop to Linux yet, as they currently don't see sufficient numbers in the platform to make a good business case for it."
they could spend a little more time developing/testing their wares so they run fine in wine/cedega/crossover just like corel did once.
this would help creating market to an eventual native port.
What ? Me, worry ?
Hopefully, Photoshop and Illustrator will be ported. If they are, Linux can count me in as one of their users. My Adobe applications are the only reason I still use Windows.
With how (seemingly) easy they ported Acrobat Reader to Linux, I can't imagine Photoshop being too much different.
;) (unless you're writing with evil compiler-specific hacks)
:-P
The only difficult part would be the GUI stuff, all the underlying code is just C++, which, IIRC is pretty portable
Funny story my friend bill told me about WWDC (refrencing Photoshop's portability)
Apparently Apple gave free t-shirts if you have a project with over 5000 lines of code that you compiled with XCode. Some really dorky guy quietly walks up, writes down "Photoshop"....the apple guy looked at him for a second...and then just handed him a shirt, no questions asked
Error 407 - No creative sig found
. . . about Sklyarov, do they? They can port Photoshop to Linux; I'll stick with the GIMP, thank you very much.
I really have to wonder why it took so long for Adobe to jump on the Linux bandwagon. Sure, everybody and their mother will say that there is the GIMP and I agree, it is a great program and ver powerful. However, that being said, it is no Adobe Photoshop.
In the election spirit, to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen
"I have used Photoshop. Photoshop is my friend. Mr. GIMP, you are no Photoshop." (Sorry, I couldn't resist)
Seriously, if Adobe moves into Linux with Photoshop and the other heavy hitters from their lineup (e.g., Illustrator) it will do two things. The first is truly and absolutely, positively legitimatize Linux (but honestly, it didn't really need it but this is a true stamp of approval). Second, they will just further extend their lead in the computer graphics market because it would be hard not to believe that a Linux-optimized Photoshop would do well in terms of marketshare. Also, just as important, when does Macromedia jump into the deep end of the Linux pool? They would almost for certain have to make some kind of move.
Sure, it would cannibalize some of their Mac and Windows market, but I feel pretty confident that there is a significant number of people that are waiting for this offering. While we can argue all day about some of Adobe's policies and other doings, I tip my hat to them on this one.
No trees were harmed in the composition of this; however, numerous electrons were inconvenienced.
Sorry but like the Open Office vs Microsoft Office debate.. for free products they are astoundingly good, and given the choice between not using office and graphics tools and using OO / GIMP then i'd use the free software in a second.
But if price were no issue, the commercial applications would rule the roost! THATS a no brainer... IMHO of course.
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
It isn't? Do you doubt that the GIMP is used professionaly in non-print graphics (web design, games)? Even if GIMP isn't used Cinepaint sure is.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
I fell for the parent's trick yesterday. If you click the links your browser window will reduce to a smaller size and bounce around the screen, and an audio clip will play saying "I'm looking at gay porno", and because your browser window is dancing around it's hard to close. Really, it's a pretty nicely crafted troll. But a troll nonetheless.
This post cannot be rebroadcast without the express written constent of Major League Baseball.
IIRC, back in 1997, I was running Photoshop 3.x on an SGI O2. Gee, don't they have Photoshop for Mac OS X? I think porting to the Linux platform would be one of the killer apps we've all been looking for. Now, I'm a big fan of Macintosh in the commercial graphics industry, but I've been saying for years, besides a great office suite (see OpenOffice), good image editing and manipulation software would plant Linux right in there as a great desktop alternative.
Yes, this is open for great debate, but the fact is, many companies that can't afford the great Macintosh (no disprespect intended) would gladly plop Photoshop on Linux. But that's my opinion.
INSERT INTO comment VALUE('Doh!') WHERE user='you';
There is an adobe reader for linux. I just can't read Adobe E-books in Linux.
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
This comes up time and time and time again. It needs to be addressed once and for all.
/NOTHING/ to do with the BSD subsystem that the whole OS runs on. Nothing. Nada. Nil. PhotoshopCS for OSX doesn't "run on BSD" in any way at all. It's linked against several frameworks (libs, if you like), which are exclusively Apple, such as Cocoa (Apple's implementation of OpenSTEP), and possibly Quartz, and other things which have nothing at all to do with Darwin, the BSD core that lies underneath OSX.
The GUI applications on OSX have
There is no "written for BSD code" in any Photoshop (as far as anyone can tell, it IS closed after all). GUI (Cocoa) apps for OSX are as different from Linux programs as different can be. Sorry to burst your bubble.
It's obvious why Adobe is now thinking about building some leverage here:
With Linux making considerable inroads in the server market, Adobe needs to ensure their backend products are still going to be available.
Of course, tying in with that is Adobe's total dominance of PDF as a standard and their stranglehold on fonts... If Adobe can get a toehold in how things like PDFs and fonts are displayed on the Linux desktop, they can push out the little Linux PDF players and retain dominance.
From there, if Adobe makes some serious impact, THEN we'll probably see desktop apps starting to port to Linux.
If you see Acrobat as a Linux app, that's your first step.
Well, contrary to some oppinions voiced, I must admit that Adobe might be aiming at deploying its more sophisticated tools such as Photoshop and Illustrator on Linux platforms. Why? Well, after various goverments on local and national levels, such as Germany, France, UK, Indochina, Brazil, even Basque Parliament and more have started migrating to Linux en masse, it is not even a matter of when but now that Linux users' market will develop serious need for Adobe's products. Thus, I'd dare say Adobe knows damn well what it's doing, and might well hit a platinum vein in this little undertaking.
'...computers in the future may have only 1000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons...' Popular Mechanics, 03/49'
Virtually everybody who makes GUI apps for Mac OS X uses either Cocoa or Carbon (which both use the other one in their respective implementations) and Quicktime. At least those frameworks would have to be ported first.
Donate free food here
I really have to wonder why it took so long for Adobe to jump on the Linux bandwagon.
Because the Linux bandwagon currently only exists for servers. That's where the big spotlight is in the market. Adobe has some very minor server software for PDFs, but everthing else is the desktop. And the Linux desktop isn't taking the market by storm like the Linux server.
Developers: We can use your help.
Most people using Photoshop professionally have a large amount of time invested in learning and mastering the program. These people aren't going to casually switch to another image editor because of price or a handful of cool features. There have been some very good commercial competitors to Photoshop over the years including the highly regarded LivePicture, but none of them has threatened Photoshop's dominance. Adobe now markets heavily to the consumer end of this market with Photoshop Elements which still contains most of the Photoshop features a casual user might need and this ultimately reinforces Photoshop's market-leading position.
If I were Adobe (which I'm not), instead of just an Adobe user (which I am), I'd be putting more effort into porting my flagship products to AMD/PPC/Intel 64-bit platforms now for the next release. Most Adobe products are compute intensive, and run by people who can afford leading edge hardware. 64-bits has been out for over a year now in both their main markets, and that would be the compelling reason to buy the next upgrade.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Hopefully, Photoshop and Illustrator will be ported. If they are, Linux can count me in as one of their users. My Adobe applications are the only reason I still use Windows.
I used to run Windows for this precise reason as well as you. Now I run both Photoshop and Illustrator quite happily on OS.X. I am free from Windows viruses/worms/trojans nor do I have to put up with the multitude of petty annoyances brought on by immature open source apps when running Linux as a desktop OS (Linux as a server OS is a whole other chapter of course). I did try to run Photoshop for Windows under Linux/Wine but it does not work 100% and it's generally just to much hassel for my taste to run Windows apps on Linux when I can run most of them natively on a Mac or find an acceptable substitute. The only thing I'm missing now is a G5 PowerBook (not on the market yet) although Photoshop runs amazingly well on my current 1.25Ghz G4 PowerBook.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Of course not!! i believe the very act of porting the software to a linux machine would create the numbers they need!!!i don't think i only speak for myself when i say it feels like i am stuck with windows as long as i am trying to stay marketable in the graphics design world. Sure those of you Linux people might say, "Linux has a lot of software that acts like Photoshop..." But thats just not good enough... i promise, i for one would reformat this weekend if i could use the same graphics software on a Linux machine...
You've said the same thing about 100 other people have said in this thread. But, you're not thinking... you're ALREADY an Adobe customer. Why would they bother to port to Linux for you, and everybody else that says, "If I had Photoshop on Linux, I'd use Linux"? What do they stand to gain? You're not a new customer. If anything, they'd make LESS money, because they're not going to gain any new customers, but will have to spend ($100,000's?) to port to Linux.
I don't respond to AC's.
I'm a graphic designer, as well. I agree that Gimp versions 2.0 had a 'really bad' UI, but I think it's fine now -- in some ways even *better* than Photoshop (I love being able to just right-click to get to the menu w/o moving the mouse to the top of the screen [this can really make a difference on a 22" monitor :-)]). It is different from Photoshop, so if what you're looking for is something *exactly* like PS you will be dissapointed, but that's through no fault of the Gimp, just people's own conditioning.
---
Another of those 'it must be crap because it's free' people. There are things that MS Office can do that Open Office cannot do and GIMP is not a drop-in replacement for Photoshop. If OO office or GIMP will not meet a person's needs, of course they will need to choose another product; it is not a matter of whether a product is "free" or commercial, it is a matter of needed functionality. Just because a particular piece of software is "free" does not mean that it is not useful.
You must also be one of those folks who prefers to run IIS or Netscape/iPlanet (or whatever it's called now) just because they are "commercial" products rather than running Apache, which is "free".
Of course it won't get photoshop ported to luinux! Did you read the summary?
A company spokesman said they are not currently looking to port any of their flagship products such as Photoshop to Linux yet
Most viable project that Adobe can open source is Postscript above all else.
How is postscript not open? Adobe provides full specifications available to anyone to implement it. Completely royalty free and without patent encumbrance.
Postscript is not a end product thus no real self threat
Wrong. Postscript is a product. Who makes the embedded PS systems for the millions of PS printers out there, eh?
it can however very much gain a large programmer pool and a good image.
It already has these things. Have you been living under a rock since 1985 when Postscript language specifications and reference manual (AKA 'the blue-book' and 'the red-book')
Their image currently is one of being very hostile towards the community.
In your mind perhaps.