«
»

Why Not A More Universal Binary?

Now that Apple computers have Intel processors and their operating systems are Mach + FreeBSD, why don’t software companies like Adobe port their applications to other BSD’s and unix variants?

I have read a couple of good articles about differences among several unix operating systems and linux in binary execution methods. I can get that they aren’t the same but they aren’t completely different either. Apple’s MAC OS X uses its own method of binary execution. Linux uses something called ELF. Anyway, I will not get into technical detail. My dream is rather economical in a perspective of a consumer.

Sometimes I doubt about Adobe’s willing to earn more money from its software by increasing sales. Suppose that you own a small business, a small advertising agency that specializes on below-the-line work for big agencies and graphical design for web sites and web applications. If you had the chance to buy Adobe software and run it on linux or freebsd, why wouldn’t you do just that instead of purchasing a set of expensive Apple computers?

I think that porting its applications onto unix operating systems other than MAC OS X would just add to Adobe’s profits. The same holds valid for other software companies that produce software for Windows and MAC OS X too. Now that they have universal binaries for Apple so their software would run on Intel based Macs (which will be the only future of Apple computers), they should also port them to other unix variants.

Similar Posts:


This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 21st, 2007 at 1:26 am and is filed under Apple, Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Responses (Links to this post)

One Response to “Why Not A More Universal Binary?”

  1. Bob/Paul Says:
    April 11th, 2007 at 7:19 am

    They won’t have a Universal Binary until the next Photoshop is released–CS2 still runs on emulation–there’s no Cairo for Linux, many of the libraries are different, their existing build tools probably don’t support it, etc.

    Apple moving to Intel doesn’t make it anymore likely than it was before. Currently adobe has 2 groups working on Photoshop–one Windows and one OSX. Adding *nix support would pretty much necessitate a third group. I still think they should do it, but you should no the playing field hasn’t changed… at all.