> It is difficult for a company to justify putting tens of
> thousands of man hours and millions of dollars of NRE into
> a software program that will be free.
Not all software that runs in Linux is free.
And many are the souls that would be very willing to pay for software like Camtasia and CuBase on Linux.
There are basically two pricing models.
* Pay full-price once and pay upgrade-price for major upgrades
* Buy a subscription and get the upgrades free
The problem lies with the daunting task of having to develop for umpteen different distributions.
How about if they target one distribution. For example, a consumer app might be best suited for Ubuntu. Certainly not fedora or the more techie distributions that are targeted at developers.
I am only favoring Ubuntu since I have used it a bit (as a consumer). But it seems to be the closest to a mainstream distribution.
Just my 2cents. :)