If Adobe wants to fight, it should leverage FOSS

Andrés Osinski

As we have seen in the blogosphere, devs are up in arms about Apple's attempt to close down their mobile ecosystem even further. Suffice to say people are not glad about the fact that their choices for programming in one of their favorite platforms have been reduced substantially.

This does not come as a surprise for myself or anyone with a little bit of common sense on the Free Software camp: you live by the sword coding for a proprietary (or, as Spanish-speaking FOSS supporters like to say, privative) platform, you die by the sword. In the choice of submitting to a master, you must accept that the rules are arbitrary and "enlightened self-interest" is merely a way to say most of the times you'll come out fine, and accept the lack of control a another risk to take into account (or not, considering how many people were not capable of seeing a lockdown of this magnitude).

But let's get away from the rhetoric for a minute and concentrate on the emerging warfare between Adobe and Apple. Evidently the Adobe folks were taken off-guard by these events as well. Now, Adobe-Apple animosity has existed for as long as Photoshop's been running on Apple computers; Adobe has consistently been late to adopt platform guidelines, has suffered blowback from a subpar Flash implementation, and receives constant criticism for its CS flagship applications crashing during the middle of work sessions.

Despite that, the interested parties have all much to lose from altering the status quo: Adobe moves a massive amount of Photoshop licenses on Mac, Apple gets a substantial market share of designers and application developers from having Adobe products as first-class citizens, everyone in the Mac camp from consumers to pros to developers is happy (except for the occasional Flash crash). If the Adobe experience were to worsen on Macs, several things might happen:

Large design and graphic houses whose lifeblood depends on Adobe CS products would migrate to Windows, living with whatever gripes and lack of expertise they might have on the platform in favor of staying on the move.
Independent Mac devs (and possibly Apple itself) would fill up the niche and take opportunity of Adobe's weakness to develop first-class alternatives. A barely "good enough" product would not move the large players away from their software dependencies, but it could shake up freelancers and independents, having a sufficient market share to eventually face Adobe head-on. Anyone who can stay on the market for 2-3 years to live a software upgrade cycle can afford to compete.

Neither Apple nor Adobe would benefit from this move, and it is very clear that it's a dark path for everyone, including consumers who would have to readjust.

Adobe, however, as a software vendor with a cross-platform product, need not actually have to back down from the Mac platform to cause substantial damage to Apple; it need only port its existing solution to an operating system that has clear advantages of its own and provide legitimate competition. That OS, right now, is Linux.

Let's take the facts at hand:

There's been a gradual push in the last two years for Linux vendors to create ties with proprietary software devs to improve the user experience, doing things such as giving a uniform UI experience and stable, predictable API release cycles. Yes, an important number of FOSS advocates want nothing to do with this, but as Linux market share increases and it becomes a more mainstream product (surprisingly so, when looking at the market share in many countries, corporations and governments), a substantial number of users want the software they need to work. And as long as these improvements don't worsen current FOSS options, no one's in a position to complain.
Linux already sees much use in large FX houses, both in the back end and the front end. Most 3D rendering packages already have Linux ports of very high quality, and a number of companies and users are not afraid of embracing a new product if it offers clear, visible advantages as far as cost and vendor lock-in go. Since most places already have specific Windows and OSX machines just for Photoshop work, moving over this part of the workflow to where the rest of things happen would not be a difficult choice, and would help to homogenize software configurations.
Platform mindshare for Linux is already there. The knowledge for porting large projects from UNIX to Linux and from Windows to Linux exists, and commercial Linux vendors such as Red Hat, Canonical and Novell would be more than happy to provide assistance if it means exponential growth and a new market opportunity in light of most UNIX installs having already converted to Linux where necessary.
Believe me: Apple is scared to death of Linux. It is the antithesis of their revenue model and lock-in strategies, and while they have very good ways to make the public aware of Linux's liabilities, they have nothing to counter the obvious weaknesses of a closed, proprietary model in both mobile and desktop offerings (Mark Pilgrim has a very good writeup on the reasons for switching to a Free platform). Apple's marketing is oriented towards shooting down Microsoft's software, but the fact that Linux is not even mentioned on their keynotes, even on graphs where it is highly relevant, shows they have no intention of making the average consumer aware of a third alternative.

Would this be ideal? Not really. I'd be the first to say Adobe would have a huge task at hand that might not even work out correctly:

Adobe already has a massive number of employees working to maintain two ports of their software; adding a third would imply more than a 50% increase in workload (a port from scratch would need a lot of research ) to make the Linux experience an equal with current offerings. The codebase is old and very likely littered with little things that might not have even contemplated anything not Win32 or Carbon (see the troubles Adobe has with the Cocoa API).
Nobody can say for sure whether Adobe is actually affected enough to warrant and effort of this level.
A port would likely take years, during which Apple would obviously realize what's coming and find ways of its own to remediate the situation, and I trust they would have an adequate alternative with such motivation.
Free Software developers love creating alternatives to proprietary solutions; you can be sure GIMP development would double in speed, and a dozen projects would spring to life trying to offer new choices. Most would fail, but a couple of success stories would be sufficient to hinder the initiative.

Nontheless, I belive that success in Adobe getting CS to run on a third platform would be the largest single blow in mindshare for Mac, and might increase Linux usage to levels never before seen, surpassing even Canonical's efforts to bring Linux to the masses.