[LUGSB] Adobe is considering porting its Creative Suite to Linux

[Dan Kegel]

On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 4:00 AM, Richard Yao <ryao at ic.sunysb.edu> wrote:
> There is a petition for Adobe to produce its Creative Suite for Linux:
>
> http://www.getsatisfaction.com/adobe/topics/produce_creative_suite_for_linux
>
> It seems to have gotten the attention of Carey Burgess at Adobe, who
> says that he has forwarded it to "the appropriate team who will
> consider it for future releases of Adobe software", which is awesome.
>
> By the way, everyone please vote for the petition and ask the people
> you know to vote for it too. It looks like there is really a chance
> that native ports of Photoshop and Dreamweaver will become available
> for Linux.

Let me chime in from afar here.  (I'm an open source developer in Los Angeles,
and joined your list a month or so ago when there was talk of your lug having
an open source hackfest, I thought I could help with that.)

Back when I was nudging Wine as hard as I could to support Photoshop,
I exchanged a few emails with the Adobe guy who heads Photoshop,
John Nack.  His attitude towards a Linux port can be seen in this blog
post:
http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2008/02/wine_offers_improved_photoshop_on_linux_su.html
in which he says (in a comment to a comment, scroll down a bit):
"The question is, and always has been, whether Adobe could achieve
meaningful revenue growth by offering a third version of Photoshop.
Would porting to Linux bring in tens of thousands of new users (those
who aren't already using PS on Mac or Windows), or would it simply
shift part of the existing user base to a different OS? "

So, in his view, it's easy to tell when it's time to do a Linux port: when
there are tens of thousands of people using Linux already who
do not currently own Photoshop but would buy a copy if and only
if it were available on Linux.

In other words, they'd need to see about fifty thousand signatures on
that petition before they would really take notice.
- Dan