Nero has released Nero Linux 3, billed as the “ultimate Burning application for Linux.” You can have your own for… $24.99.
Now, I’ve always had good results from Gnome’s built-in burning, or K3b. However, regardless of the availability of free/open source CD/DVD burning solutions, this is an awesome thing.
A CD/DVD burning application is not a server farm/data warehouse application; it is aimed right at the end user, the desktop market. In other words, it is an implicit acknowledgment of the existence of said market. This cannot possibly be anything but good, and I’ve half a mind to drop the $25 on the software license just to encourage companies to port their desktop apps to Linux.
However, I don’t think we want to go overboard with that tactic, either. If everyone just buys commercial Linux desktop apps to “vote for Desktop Linux” rather than because they actually want the software, that creates an artificially inflated sense of demand for Linux desktop apps… seeing the numbers, yes, more companies may create desktop apps for Linux. Meanwhile, the Linux world, seeing the success of their efforts, stops buying a copy of every single Linux desktop app that comes out and goes back to burning with K3b, coding with Bluefish, and playing Tux Racer. Then what? All the companies that saw the numbers don’t sell the number of apps that they thought they would, and they stop making them.
Okay, that’s a worst case scenario; you could also have a simultaneous increase in market share, you could have a company rise up that actually offers a great consumer-targeted Linux desktop & laptop product (and I bet it will not be Dell) — any number of things could happen in the next few years.
So I think… if you want the app, if you’d like to use it on Linux… heck yes, go buy it. Let’s have a real, living market for Linux desktop applications; markets work best when supply and demand are governed by what people actually want…
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