Stuff We Want: Whatever John Dvorak is Smoking
If you follow the tech sector closely you’ll know that columnist John Dvorak is best known for two things — making outlandish claims that never materialize and providing endless fodder for Daring Fireball humor.
But occasionally Dvorak is right and his recent call for Adobe to port its apps to Linux is spot on, complete with some excellent reasons why the move would benefit Adobe. In fact, it’s the very same thing Linux users have been saying for oh, ten, fifteen years now. Welcome to the party John.
The problem with Dvorak’s suggestion is that it has absolutely no grasp on reality.
Dvorak overlooks the fact that porting Photoshop or Lightroom to a new platform would require Adobe to make a massive investment of time, manpower and money. Couple that with the fact that there are very few successful proprietary apps on the Linux platform (especially those in Photoshop’s price range) and you can begin to see why Adobe hasn’t already pursued the idea.
Dvorak puts a slightly different spin on things by suggesting that Adobe use Linux to create what would amount to Adobe’s own custom distro to compete with Windows. It sounds nice, but we’re not sure why Adobe would want to compete with Windows since its an operating system, while the Creative Suite is a collection of photo/video editing apps.
Dvorak seems to think that since Microsoft’s Silverlight is a potential threat to Adobe’s Flash, that porting the Creative Suite apps to Linux would somehow threaten Microsoft and by extension, Silverlight. Wait, what?
Would we love to see Photoshop running native on the Linux platform? Absolutely. Do we think it’s likely to happen? Absolutely not.
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