> The main problem is that there's more than one Linux distro out there, and they're not compatible with each other. But as Google does already with Google Eart

> The main problem is that there's more than one Linux distro out there, and they're not compatible with each other. But as Google does already with Google Earth and Chrome, for instance, it's not that hard to just target RH/Fedora and Debian/Ubuntu/Mint. Google is quite an unusual case, though: they need to provides comparatively little end-user support for those products (relative to the absolutely huge sizes of the company and the user-bases). They already have the resources to build Linux versions, and they probably want them for their large internal pool of Linux users any way, but it is not business-critical to them whether Google Earth or even a given version of Google Chrome work well for you as a Linux user on your particular system. AFAIK they don't have to provide training, phone support or even a huge amount of detailed docs as part of offering the Linux builds of the products. For companies with proprietary, licensed products, particularly the really feature-rich ones that focus on business or professional users, the product has to work without glitches or quirks on every platform that they support. When it doesn't, things rapidly get expensive: diagnosing bugs in the field and shipping fixes is still frequently time-consuming and labour-intensive. Even maintaining a test process for five Linux distributions to validate releases is not going to be cheap, and probably not cost-effective. They also need developers, QA and support staff with a working knowledge of two families of Linux. And if they did it, they would consistently get requests for supporting more distributions, and have to keep politely saying "no" over and over again... It does make economic sense for some companies to produce Linux versions of their products today, but I think that it's fair that each of them is unusual in some way. The situation needs to change for the economics to work for the average ISV.