On Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 6:00 AM, Patrick Shirkey <pshirkey@boosthardware.com> wrote:

I suppose that their marketing department has decided that Linux
Developers/Users don't represent a big enough share of the market to
justify committing more resources to the platform.

You have no idea what their marketing department has decided. Admit it.

However JACK also runs on the other two main platforms so what is their
rational behind completely ignoring it altogether while committing
resources to creating a competing API?

How many times is it necessary for someone to explain that JACK and AL are NOT competing APIs ?

Keep in mind that they have explicitly stated that Ableton Live will NEVER
run on Linux. It seems a bit hypocritical to me that highly regarded
people from this community are proposing to add support for the new
protocol and at the same time questioning why there is (still) antagonism
towards Ableton.

I have no idea what statement you are referring to, but if I was to guess it might be when Gerhard Behles, one of the company's (and software's) founders was at LAC in Berlin in 2007. Which means basically before Android took over the world and Chromebooks and ...

If so, this is a statement that is getting on for a decade of aging, and it is absurd to view this as policy. You have absolutely no idea what Ableton is and is not doing with Linux, or what its policies (if there are indeed any) toward Linux are. I suggest you regard that statement as a bit of off-its-time sensible marketing wisdom from nearly a decade ago, and move on.

Other proprietary companies have no problems releasing their software to
run on Linux.

And many others are NOT. So what would that mean? (that's a rhetorical question)