Many independent game developers have been arguing recently that porting games to OS X and Linux is a good idea, not because you will sell a lot of Linux copies, but because you get a lot of free advertising which leads to more sales on all platforms. Can this argument work with general applications, too, though?

Unfortunately, I doubt it in most cases. There are already so many great Linux applications that a new application, closed or open source, doesn’t really make much of a splash unless it is already well known, which largely defeats the point of gaining the PR from the port.

For example, look at the recent releases of commercial, closed-source comic and book organization software for Linux from RadicalBreeze. As much as I would like to see these applications succeed, they haven’t gotten a huge amount of attention, despite being something of a test of Linux as a target for commercial development.

As a counterexample, though, Dropbox seemed to get a fair amount of attention for porting their software to Linux. The difference in their case, I suspect, was that they had enough attention already to really be noticed, but not enough that they didn’t benefit from the port.

While for some companies porting applications to Linux may yield a big PR spike, most companies are, unfortunately, probably either too big to care or too small to be noticed.

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