Hi Bryant,
Thanks for that. I'd challenge quite a few of the assumptions you've
made there, based on my own experience, but perhaps that would be better
discussed off-list.
* the possibility that Linux support might not have
much marketing
impact with professional devices (as opposed to consumer devices that
are more accessible to a wider range of developers)
That tends to depend on the size of the customer organisation. If we're
talking about a major broadcaster which has in-house software engineers,
then the ability to obtain source code and documentation is a major
plus, especially towards long-term maintainability.
On the other hand, source code isn't of direct use to small producers
without developer expertise who only ever use off-the-shelf products.
These people expect the vendor to take care of any bugs, and expect to
adapt themselves to work with the software as it is, rather than adapt
the software to do what they want.
Cheers!
Daniel