On 10/8/2010 4:40 PM, Les Mikesell wrote: > On 10/8/2010 5:25 PM, Warren Young wrote: >> >> But a fair comparison would be the Adobe Creative Suite, since Adobe >> presumably wants their software used everywhere. You can't blame Adobe >> for not porting it. They've dipped their toe in the water several >> times, and shied away each time. > > I don't blame any software vendor for not porting to Linux, but the > problem is self-inflicted by the Linux distributions refusing to > standardize the available libraries and APIs so binary packages can work > across them. > > Probably the best we are going to see now will be javascript-framework > applications that run portably inside browsers. Flash Builder is based on Eclipse, which runs on Java. That's about as close to your speculated environment as you can wish. And, it's not like Eclipse doesn't already run well on Linux. I think the explanation is different: they tried for a few years to drum up support for FB on Linux, too few customers showed up, so they decided to refocus on the two platforms that do make them money. Y'all may recall a different example: Word Perfect was also once offered on Linux for about a year, then pulled. OpenOffice wasn't even around at the time, so you can't blame competition. Corel had a near open field to play in, and still couldn't make a buck.