Tookelso wrote:Please, just get something out there. Lots of developers are switching to Linux, and you're missing out on a really young market.
I have followed this thread for coming up on three years. I became so convinced that it was hopeless, that I stopped wasting money on upgrades and moved on to other products.
Ingo wrote:Why can't we start a petition to inform IDM on how many of us need this software on linux?
This is likely the most read, most replied-to thread in the forums. What part of >106 replies and >56,338 reads over three years doesn't constitute a petition to you? The message isn't dead but perhaps it should be.
I believe the Window of opportunity (pardon the pun) has closed. The Eclipse platform and a variety of other suitable substitutes have entered the market. Economic elasticity. While it saddens me, I fear that Ian has lost the potential to secure cross-platform marketshare.
I don't fault the business decision that had to be made. I posit that it was a potentially very difficult decision to exclude a broad market segment. But it allowed him to focus effort toward refining and expanding the portfolio of Windows offerings. It's also useful to keep in mind that Ian's background is in engineering management and that the editor was an initial learning exercise--a learning exercise that was based upon a Microsoft pragma. Linux was/is alien turf for Ian.
Given potential VM solutions, there are alternatives that may still appeal to the Linux community. Cross-over Office has become very mature. Local VMWare guests can provide smb exports to allow for native or hosted Windows editing...
Take the time to read the whole thread that reaches back into 2004. I fear the oxygen we are metabolizing to continue to debate this is simply adding unnecessarily to planetary carbon emissions.
Cheers,
Rich Wermske
http://www.wermske.com