Re: Frame Linux what to do??

[jeremy@xxxxxxxxx (Jeremy H. Griffith)]

On Wed, 29 Nov 2000 10:45:02 -0800, "Lee Richardson" 
<lhr@Adobe.COM> wrote:

>We did quite a bit of research and got hard data showing 
>that the market for FrameMaker on Linux was too small to 
>be viable, especially given the large investment we'd have 
>to make to create a real Linux product.

That's kind of amazing.  Linux is the fastest-growing
platform around.  If the market is too small today,
it won't be tomorrow.  There is no such thing as "hard
data" about this, and any analyst who claims there is
should be viewed with caution, if not suspicion.

As to the costs... it's hard to understand what would
cost so much, given that Adobe already supports UNIX
on several platforms.  Linux is just UNIX on Intel,
with a few little variations.  Another company with
which I worked in the past frequently added new UNIX
platforms; the ports typically took a day or two, for
a set of modules comparable to FrameMaker in size...
The biggest problem was identifying and working around
bugs in the C compiler implementations by the OEMs,
not much of an issue with Linux and gcc.

Given this most unfortunate decision, though, Adobe
has created an opportunity for other vendors to create
a FrameMaker work-alike on Linux.  Did anyone at Adobe
realize this... and also realize that the winner of
this race will be ported to Win and Mac, for sure?
And possibly for free, if this makes enough developers
start contributing to KWord, which has gotten a long
ways with only two programmers working on it...  I'd
think Adobe would do a Linux port in pure self-defense,
before the entire FM market was lost... but then I
don't work at Adobe.  Corporate cultures tend to set
unexamined limits to vision; Adobe's and Omni's are
very different, so we see different realities.

We were planning to port Mif2Go to Linux too; we
were waiting for the FDK to be ported, and of course
for Adobe's confirmation of continuing FM ports.
Without either of those, and with the beta version
self-destructing in a month (a cruel thing to do to
its users, under the circumstances), it makes no sense
for us, or any other plugin maker, to do the port.

But we will be looking very hard at sponsoring the
Linux work-alike, most likely as a GPL open source
project.

-- Jeremy H. Griffith, at Omni Systems Inc.
  (jeremy@omsys.com)  http://www.omsys.com/

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