@Andres Gonzales: While it’s a good idea to politely ask plugin manufacturers to support ardour / linux, I think it is unlikely that it will happen (unless it is a result of already using a crossplatform GUI toolkit e.g. JUCE, which just happens to work on linux)
I did post a request to support Ardour/linux over at the McDSP site. If more users would request this from the mainstream plugin manufacturers maybe they would respond.
I think even if all the linux audio users requested this it would still not be enough for commercial developers for other platforms to consider it worthwhile. It is very hard to guess the number of linux audio users (and the percentage of those who are willing / able to pay for professional quality software) but the indications as far as I can tell are that it is a very very small number.
In addition, (and I speak from personal experience) linux can be a very risky platform for commercial developers to develop for. As an example, about 90% of my time is spent just maintaining my existing software against all the potential distribution incompatibilities, host incompatibilities, (and sometimes arbitarily changing standards), new / old / deprecated plugin APIs, graphical library APIs, packaging standards (or the lack of them), misbehaving package manager applications etc etc.
And the situation is getting worse, with more of what could once be considered the ‘standard base’ being replaced, or customised by the different distributions.
Contrast this with some of the plugins I ported to Windows, they will run on anything from Win95 through to Win7. And are compatible with just about all VST hosts from early pre-cubase steinberg software up to the present versions.
@Seablade:
last I heard can't make nearly enough to support himself alone on Linux.
It’s true no one’s going to get rich doing this, but I think there’s enough of a potential market to survive for a while - but it also depends on people being aware of the value / work involved in doing this, and how that impacts on the price of the final product. For example:
In one plugin, at a rough estimate there are approx 20 - 40,000 lines of code (some in re-usable modules, including all the low level GUI toolkit) but it was all developed at a cost, (and that doesn’t include the graphical design too)
Combine that with approx 2 - 3 Months development (and importantly - testing) for a new plugin and equate that for example to how much someone using the software professionally would charge for that time and I think the value (and development cost) soon becomes apparent.