http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2008/10/picasa-3-beta-for-linux.html

<<We're proud to announce the public beta of Picasa 3.0 for Linux (just a few days past the end of summer :-)

With version 3, Picasa adds improved Linux desktop integration. For instance, it now uses your preferred file manager, and you can use your preferred email program to send photos directly from Picasa. Picasa even integrates with the camera detection features in Gnome and KDE, so your desktop environment will ask you to
launch Picasa when you plug in your camera. Our native Firefox integration also makes it easy to download entire albums from Picasa Web Albums with just a click.>>

Picasa 3 worked perfectly with wine since it was released for windows. It still doesn't support video in linux though. There is still no native port. I also wonder why Google keeps it proprietary. Can anyone think of anything in the code that Google wouldn't want to have released?

<< Picasa was not all written from scratch (and it's apparently up to 500K lines of code) – it includes a number of other pieces of software. Some of these are open source, whilst others were commercially licenced from their producers.

The Independent JPEG Group are acknowledged on the About screen, where the Sonic logo also appears. Some of the open source programs and libraries are listed on the requirements page, though as of July 2006, the links to the actual acknowledgements and licence conditions are broken, which may mean Google is in breach of those licence conditions.

The Linux version of Picasa uses additional pieces of software, in particular it is based around Wine (an implementation of the Windows API on Linux), which itself uses gPhoto for its digital camera support; and Gecko from The Mozilla Foundation. There were a number of patches to Wine needed to get Picasa running on Linux.

   * Independent JPEG Group whose software provides extensive support for the JPEG image format
   * zLibDll provides compressed file support using the zip file format
   * PuTTY implements Telnet and SSH
   * LibTiff supports the Tiff image format
   * LZMA SDK used in the Picasa and Hello installers
   * Nullsoft installer used for current versions of Picasa
   * Sonic provides the CD and DVD burning technology.
   >>

http://www.zmarties.com/picasa/

At the very least, the CD/DVD burning technology from Sonic is proprietary.

Ah, that all makes sense but are there not free software alternatives for all of those things?