Sad, yes. Stupid, no.

CCP isn't a megacorp, and in case you haven't looked at a paper lately, it's belt-tightening time all 'round.

If not enough use it, and the win32 binaries work just fine in Wine/etc, get rid of it.

Oh? Perhaps you'd care to tell me what Bizarro World business ethic mandates that you cut loose paying customers during one of the worst economic environments this generation's ever seen?

That would best be answered by stating that CCP is a business, and they are in business to make money. If the return on investment in keeping the official Linux client support is in the negative, it only makes business sense to cut your losses and move on.

It's not as if the Linux client will suddenly stop working (if it ever worked in the first place...) and you are certainly welcome to show your displeasure by canceling your account(s). In the end, however, it is helpful to realize that you are still getting the product you paid for, which is permission to connect to and play on EVE's game servers.

I know that I'd much rather see them drop a client used by a tiny minority of EVE players than to recover from the loss of keeping it going by laying off employees or reducing the amount of investment they put into the game itself as a whole.

Major kudos to CCP for even having and keeping a linux client alive for this long. Sad to see it go.

As far as business model involved, that would be the following one: too expensive to retain the number of customers using it. It costs to develop for that platform, and if that platform doesn't draw enough customers, then it'll get cut.

I suppose I should clarify. Yes, the client will stop working suddenly upon release of any patch after March 10th. However, as of right now you are still up and running.