My previous two posts about the Fuji X-Pro1 ( here and here) drew some interesting (and amusing) comments on the web. What those comments did show is that there's a lot of misunderstanding about how the relationship between camera manufacturers and software developers works.

Again, this is my (quite cynical) viewpoint - take it for what it's worth.

In short, there's actually far less of a relationship than most people seem to assume.

Firstly, let's talk about size and scale - In the original article I made a comment about "Maybe tomorrow Fuji will send me an email". That was a joke. Perhaps not a good joke, but a joke that other small developers would have recognized. PhotoRaw sells about 100 times (maybe 1000 times) too few copies for Fuji to even know my name. Or care. Big camera manufacturers do stuff only if there's money on the line. Practically, that means keeping the bigger and more influential web sites (e.g., DPReview) on side with early access to cameras, etc. But not much else. In the time that I've been invoked in the industry as an independent player, either writing open source software such as CornerFix or commercial software such as PhotoRaw, no camera manufacturer has ever contacted me. Ever. At all, about anything. If one did, I'd be stunned.

Secondly, camera manufacturers don't really like software developers, even big ones. That may sound really strange - camera owners want their cameras to be supported by major players like Adobe and Apple, and so the camera manufacturers should work closely with them, right? Wrong.

Most camera manufacturers regard software developers essentially as parasites, making money from their hard work in designing and manufacturing cameras. So as far as a manufacturer is concerned, if anyone is going to make money from anything related to their cameras, it should be them. It's no secret that camera manufacturers have always made it hard for independent lens manufacturers to get their lens to work on cameras from the major manufacturers. Software is no different - to a camera manufacturer, software developers are a competitor, not a partner.

Practically of course, the camera manufacturers know that their customers expect their cameras to work with Lightroom or Aperture. But there's no incentive for the camera manufacturers to make that quick or easy.

The ideal position for a manufacturer is that their cameras are supported by third party software, but the manufacturer's own software works better. Ever tried to get D-Lighting on a Nikon camera to play nicely with Adobe's ACR or Lightroom? It works a lot better with Nikon's own software. And it's the software developer that will get the blame for any glitches. Fuji will have no problems at all with SILKYPIX working better than ACR - quite the contrary.

Take a look at the current finger pointing between Adobe and Fuji about information on the X-Pro1. A lot of people are assuming that part of what Fuji would give to Adobe would be information on how to get the best out of the sensor. That's really unlikely. Probably what they would have provided was basic information on the matrix layout, raw file format, calibration information such as color response, maybe technical data on noise, etc. But helpful advice on how to interpolate unevenly spaced pixels built up over the time that they had been developing the sensor? Not likely. There's no incentive to provide anything like that, and Adobe might just be able to use that information elsewhere in ACR or Lightroom. Not what Fuji would want.