Hey there, Dustin asked me to chime in. We would of course love to have Adobe's software available to Ubuntu users, and would do whatever we could to help make that happen.
However, as far as I know there is no Linux port of these products, which really limits our ability to even start on it. Likewise the software license limits our ability to share it without Adobe's approval even if we could package it. The best thing that Canonical can do, and indeed what we are doing now, is to provide stable platform for Adobe to target and the tools to make it as easy as possible for them to do that.
Ultimately the only thing that will sway Adobe are their own customers showing a demand for those products on Ubuntu. The more they hear from Ubuntu users who want to buy their software, or people who have bought their software who want to use it on Ubuntu, the more willing they will be do make it happen. And when they're ready, Canonical will make sure that Ubuntu is an inviting and worthwhile platform for them to distribute their software on.
What I want is not free Photoshop on every Ubuntu CD. Instead, work on WINE! Devote engineers to fixing bugs in WINE that block the latest versions of Creative Cloud from running. If WINE was rock solid stable for creative applications -- and promoted as so by Canonical -- I think you'd see many more people switching.
If you can sell Windows applications (with WINE included) in your store, that's all the better.
> The best thing that Canonical can do, and indeed what we are doing now, is to provide stable platform for Adobe to target and the tools to make it as easy as possible for them to do that.
There's one more thing which you guys can perhaps do that the rest of us cannot:
Canonical is well-enough known that you may be able to get a meeting with someone at Adobe, to find out what they think would convince them to pilot a Ubuntu-compatible release of CS (or at least Photoshop and Lightroom).
I assume that it's some combination of projected sales revenue, and ease porting / maintenance / support.
If someone (perhaps Canonical) can get Adobe to throw out a number regarding how much sales revenue they'd need for a port, we could use something like Kickstarter to line up the first round of purchasers as well as demonstrate the amount of (pent up) demand.
... that's not a suggestion for you, but we should probably set up a pirate PPA with already-cracked versions of Adobe software, ported to Linux. It's evil, but it proves that the demand exists and would allow developers to work of Linux.
I think it is important for us as a community to make it clear to Adobe that there is a market for this.
I am a creative professional and dev, my father is a professional photographer and we have traditionally been a mac shop with a huge spend on their hardware.
Their latest offering is driving a lot of us to machines such as the Dell XPS 13 (which I purchased instead of a MBP).
I dearly want the same experience I get with OS X - but the one thing you are missing is a good experience with Adobe.
We've got professionals escaping the Apple ecosystem successfully to Ubuntu, but this is the one sticking point. I bet a lot of people would jump ship to your platform and give it a massive boost if you could get Adobe to put money into it. It would have more effect than any other effort in driving people towards Ubuntu.
However, as far as I know there is no Linux port of these products, which really limits our ability to even start on it. Likewise the software license limits our ability to share it without Adobe's approval even if we could package it. The best thing that Canonical can do, and indeed what we are doing now, is to provide stable platform for Adobe to target and the tools to make it as easy as possible for them to do that.
Ultimately the only thing that will sway Adobe are their own customers showing a demand for those products on Ubuntu. The more they hear from Ubuntu users who want to buy their software, or people who have bought their software who want to use it on Ubuntu, the more willing they will be do make it happen. And when they're ready, Canonical will make sure that Ubuntu is an inviting and worthwhile platform for them to distribute their software on.