For myself and I would surmise, many others, the remaining killer app with no FOSS equivalent is the Adobe Creative Suite. I know there are very good FOSS equivalents for almost every app Adobe makes, but for most professionals, Adobe CS is the industry standard toolset and cannot be substituted. Additionally, CS doesn't operate reliably under Wine, and is too resource intensive for a virtual machine, in my experience.<p>I have come to believe that Creative Suite is the one of the last strings keeping many people away from Linux. Am I correct?<p>Did MS or Apple pay Adobe something to keep them from releasing for Linux?<p>Wouldn't they be wise to lock up every platform with their apps?<p>All they are doing is allowing the FOSS clones to get better and better, clone them more closely, and lock in their 100% market share on the #1 growth OS. What am I missing?
You said it: it is the thing people keep a Windows around for. So they are already buying licenses, so why would Adobe spend money on a Linux port, on extra support, ...?<p>I honestly doubt that the number of Linux users that would buy an Adobe Suite for Linux, but aren't buying it for another OS now is very large, or even close to be enough to justify the expense. Commercial desktop software on Linux doesn't have that many success stories, and right now there isn't much in the way of commercial competition that might capture that market.
I wouldn't be suprised if sometime in the past Apple and Adobe didn't collude to ensure Apple was the only Unix platform that could be considered a creative-workstation. Adobe and Apple have a long partnered history - don't let the Flash fiasco divert you from their storied history. Purely speculative tinfoil theory though.<p>However, I wouldn't be suprised if some Adobe dev's had internal Linux ports that they don't share with the public. With the majority of the core app being written in C/C++ and them porting some UI elements to HTML, I can't imagine that much of a barrier to offer a Linux equivalent.<p>The "market share" argument shouldn't be an accepted reason for them to ignore the platform - although I could see how a tunnel-visioned management team could use it in their narrative. I know too many devs who would gladly ditch their MBP, or instead install a Linux distro on it, if Adobe's product line was available for Linux.<p>Luckily, there's tools for devs today if you just need to inspect/export design like <a href="http://avocode.com" rel="nofollow">http://avocode.com</a>.
Linux represents less than 5% of the desktops and most of its users are not know to pay for software (a bit like Android).<p>It makes no financial sense, considering you have a zillion distributions to support.<p>No need of a MS and Apple conspiracy.