The Gimp is a great program for what it is, but it is severely lacking when compared to the likes of Photoshop. Google has announced that it is funding Codeweavers and their iteration of Wine, the Windows compatibility layer, in order to further promote Linux by offering in-demand, high-end, commercial software.

It has been reported that Photoshop runs quite well under Wine. Does the future of application deployment lie in virtual machines and compatibility layers? Or will there always be demand for native versions of these applications?