I'm Lee Richardson, the FrameMaker engineering mgr. Not continuing with FM on Linux was a straightforward business decision:
1) there were only a few 10s of 1000s of unique users, after a year.
2) only a fraction were willing to pay for a Linux version of FrameMaker, per the survey we did over the summer, and they were only willing to pay a fraction of the Mac/Win price
3) a notable group of those willing to buy the product were existing FrameMaker users who wanted to switch from the Win version to the (lower priced) Linux version
4) Linux is NOT 'just another Unix'. There would have been a notable investment in porting additional code, setting up QA machines for multiple Linux releases, getting Linux versions of our 3rd-party filters, handling font and printing differences... this list goes on. The fact that the list kept growing the more we learned was notable in itself.
So- doing a lot of work and adding a lot of ongoing overhead for a relatively small number of users and additional revenue didn't make sense. It would have been cool if it had worked out....Lee
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I'm Lee Richardson, the FrameMaker engineering mgr. Not continuing with FM on Linux was a straightforward business decision: 1) there were only a few 10s of 1000s of unique users, after a year. 2) only a fraction were willing to pay for a Linux version of FrameMaker, per the survey we did over the summer, and they were only willing to pay a fraction of the Mac/Win price 3) a notable group of those willing to buy the product were existing FrameMaker users who wanted to switch from the Win version to the (lower priced) Linux version 4) Linux is NOT 'just another Unix'. There would have been a notable investment in porting additional code, setting up QA machines for multiple Linux releases, getting Linux versions of our 3rd-party filters, handling font and printing differences... this list goes on. The fact that the list kept growing the more we learned was notable in itself. So- doing a lot of work and adding a lot of ongoing overhead for a relatively small number of users and additional revenue didn't make sense. It would have been cool if it had worked out. ...Lee