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Inducement To Piracy, Adobe Style
S Vulpy writes "A post at the Social Science Research Council's website talks about how piracy greases the wheels of the Adobe Creative Suite marketplace by making it easier to deal with Adobe breaking compatibility between versions. Quoting: '... such incompatibility doesn’t involve exotic functionality, just straight text layout into columns and boxes. The kind of stuff that has been core functionality of publishing software since the early 1990s. Translate this dilemma to Brazil or Russia, where incomes are a fraction that of the US and you get a very simple outcome: massive piracy of Adobe products. In fact, go through this process in the last month of a 4-year project on a deadline and one could understand becoming extremely sympathetic to such a perspective. This, as we’ve argued, is not a defect of the Adobe business model, it is the business model.'"
income in the states will will be a fraction what is was. Who is going to pay Adobe then?
So, basically, vendor lock-in is good for the vendor, and it allows the vendors to make a new version of the tool which is no longer compatible so that people need to upgrade on a pretty regular basis.
And, yes, I can certainly see how if the software is going to cost you more than a decade's worth of income or more, you're going to pirate it.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
As a casual user, I really can't justify ponying up the dollars they demand...so I went looking for alternatives. GIMP for Photoshop (recent GIMP versions are very good, BTW), Inkspace for Illustrator, etc. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to move off Adobe's products altogether.
Seems that this just becomes the standard when you have a stranglehold on the market. Maximize global profits by squeezing every dime out of the rich countries while poorer nations are the wild west.
Till the price of Adobe's stuff comes down to a real price of $19.99 I shall keep snagging the software for free. I don't profit off of my work, so don't care about licensing. The $600.00 cost is a bit much for programmers tweaking only the tools and changing some icons. The core code was wrote sometime back in the 90's, so they already picked up there ROI for the software.
BTW, Gimp is good for 4chan pics, but Photoshop is good for everything else.
"The laws of science be a harsh mistress." --Bender
As an outsider looking in, I noticed Adobe never seemed to put any serious DRM on their software. Computer games put more effort into it than Photoshop ever did. I was always surprised how easy it was to install & use Adobe products with a single serial number used by thousands. I know they did make efforts to stop the distribution, but never as hard-core as Microsoft became with Office. And considering the prices they charged, I figured Adobe would.
Then it occurred to me after working with artists who trained on Adobe products (pirated in some cases), etc. that Adobe's _real_ market for the $1000+ titles are businesses: advertising companies, professional graphic designers, businesses, etc. Going after the hobbyist or the poor artists wasn't their style. And then it clicked: when the artists came to my company, they got the company to buy Adobe products. *THUNK!* The network effect. If they can get more people used to using Adobe and associating certain high-value work with Adobe products, then the more likely they are to push for Adobe at work. And thus more money they can squeeze from businesses who make money.
So to me, allowing a certain low level amount of piracy was always part of Adobe's game.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
Therefore I would argue that Adobe is the last major software house that depends on piracy to promote products. Companies do not really have the time and money to train users. Consumers do not always have time to pay for training. Schools are not going to invest in the software. So we are back to the piracy method to create a market for the legal software.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
> Ah it's good to get my daily SlashKos dose, where there's always a
> featured story about how stealing is justified because of teh evil
> capitalismz0rz!!
+...versus the classic pseudo libertarian mindset.
"Tort reform for the rich. Crime and punishment for the poor."
The sad part is that the poor buy into this nonsense and happily cheer along their corporate overlords as if the last 500 years of social and political progress never happened at all.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Dude, we always need more big holes in the planet.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
Capitalism is fine, but abusing a monopoly position isn't. Good luck working professionally if you haven't got the latest version of Photoshop. Whether Gimp does everything you need or not, anybody that you're working with is probably going to be requiring a Photoshop compatible file.
I can tell you from experience that Intuit (Quickbooks, Quicken, Peachtree...etc.) are the worst about this. A company can effectively run the same version for several years, but if they want to share their books with an accountant (as most probably will), then the client and the accountant must all have matching software versions. If the account decides to take the brunt, then they must have enough licenses to run multiple copies simultaneously which becomes VERY expensive, plus a version for each year that their clients have. Not only do the licenses cost money, but you better have at least a 100Gb drive on every computer to hold all versions, plus a hefty dose of RAM to handle the app, plus all the others that a typical accounting firm needs to run (Office, PPC, CCH...etc).
It's a fucking racket, I tell you. The partners at my accounting firm hate me when I have to deliver the budget.
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Actually they've had varying degrees of registration hoops over the years (if I recall for CS2 you actually had to dial a number to get key confirmation). That said, tools like Photoshop are so popular cracks and workarounds show up almost immediately after launch.
On the plus side newer versions seem to have fewer useful additions but more off-putting cosmetic changes that make cheaper alternatives more appealing.
crazy dynamite monkey
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You don't need 'the latest version of Photoshop' to put out a .tiff file or a .jpg. Even PS 7 will do that just fine (as will GIMP). If you want to bend your models arm in non anatomic positions with Puppetwarp, yeah, you'll need CS 5. However, there are many older ways to make impossible looking humans or whatever it is that you're planning on altering.
The whole rant seems to revolve around InDesign. The other CS programs (Dreamweaver, Illustrator, PS, and to some extent Flash) tend to be much more conservative.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Somebody knows that projects are never really completed, and that they will be maintaining the results of that project for the next 5 years, during which time the old software may get hard to find support for.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
It's always looked to me like Adobe realizes the obvious, that the people pirating their software wouldn't be buying it anyway even if there was no other choice. It's widely used by hobby artists mainly because of piracy, otherwise they'd simply be forced to use a cheap or free alternative. I tend to think the situation is not all that different from piracy in other industries, most people who download things without paying would not have bought them even if downloading wasn't an option.
95%, if not more, of people using Photoshop don't need it. We tried for a major push for Adobe Elements at one place I worked at, but a lot of people wanted Photoshop just because it was the "grown up"/Real product.
Piracy is not what drives the business model. Piracy is a variable that gets dealt with, and sometimes the best way to deal with it is through benign neglect, as is pointed out by the Microsoft model.
What you perceive in Adobe as being driven by the pirate, or you desire not to update, is simply a failure to understand that you are not the target market. The target market is not just one person, but the professional eco-system. And more important that the price at anytime, the solution provides the overall cheapest solution in time and payment for time, but in also professional and creative ability, which also leads to less time used, and more money saved.
Adobe strives to make sure that the value of the upgrade to the primary market is worth the upgrade. IE the sum of the additional features and efficiencies from creative to output are more valuable than the costs. There are complaints everytime, but by those that don't appreciate the business model for a large variety of reasons. But if you carefully notice, the program continues to gain prominence in the target marketplace at the expense of nearly other product and workflow.
The question of piracy is important, especially in the key target markets, because there are many many people who exploit the Adobe tools and make money off them who would rather not pay. It is also true that there is more products, especially in the Photo arena that are getting play. Not so much GIMP, but products that provide frames and retro and non-digital feel to files. And programs that came with cameras and the smart phone. But none of these are going to be replacements for the target market that Adobe and actually the market, has come to depend on.
My computer at work is licensed for Acrobat 8 Professional. After upgrading Microsoft Office 2003 to 2010, I can no longer create PDF files from Word documents. Looking online, the solution to this issue from Adobe appears to be "upgrade to Acrobat X". Yeah, thanks.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
I know the party line is everything needs to be free or nearly free but you might as well say Porsche needs to sell it's cars for $5,000 or less because some people can't aford them. There are free options for some of the parts of Creative Suite but it was never intended to be the option for everyone. Most software has actually come down in price over the last 20 years inspite of most prices doubling. Maya used to sell for the price of a sports car where as today you can buy the full version for $3,700 and they used to have a two grand version. These are considered professional softwares and they require an investment. There's lots of things I'd like but I can't aford them. I've spent tens of thousands on software over the years and done without nice things to aford them so why should some one else gets theirs for free?
Exactly. Its even worse than that. Most designers are aware of Gimp, and a few know of Inkscape, but when I talk to designers, they just don't want to use them. I explain that these programs are really free as in freedom, respecting you as a person and not calling you a criminal for not paying arbitrarily high prices, and offer most of the functionality you need for most projects, especially web stuff. Still, Gimp and Inkscape won't get you hired.
Design involves workflows, and Adobe through their suites owns the workflow. There used to be a bit more competition in the design world, with Quark (which has withered) and Aldus (which Adobe bought), and Macromedia (which Adobe bought), all bringing something to the workflow. Now Adobe owns it end to end. Designers want to design, and not worry about software. And to design, someone needs to pay you, and for someone to pay you, you need to use the tools everyone else is using. So you pirate Adobe so you can work with others, and when the day comes that you are working for the sort of place that might be mindful of the BSA, or you are making the big money yourself, you finally buy a license. All that time before then was kind of like an extended "trial period" really.
Still, I do think something can be done. There is plenty of design in free and open source software projects and companies. They should whenever possible insist on use of FOSS tools, and they should make a big deal about the fact that they use them, and why they use them. I know its a niche market, but Gimp has already found some success in the rather big money niche of film. There is a huge reserve army of unemployed designers who just might be interested in the whole "free as in freedom" idea as long as it also brought a little "money as in paycheck".
It's one of those things where even if Elements (or Gimp or whatever) does 99% of what you need it only takes that 1% to be deeply annoying.
Don't forget schools. Art schools have to buy tons of licenses with each new version release (although they are usually a version or two behind since CS2).
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
We can provide corporate welfare to adobe. Are they a US or EU company?
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
This is due to two reasons:
1: DRM isn't needed in businesses due to the BSA. Fear of running afoul of the BSA keeps the licenses current in almost any company, and companies who don't license their software are just one ex-employee with an "anonymous" report away from being shut down due to large fines.
2: Adobe is the only game in town. Realistically here, the high end camera makers don't write plugins for the GIMP, so if one wants to make use of the RAW images from one's EOS-1 or other camera without losing data, they are either using Photoshop, or perhaps Lightroom. Ever see a pro photographer using the GIMP for their portfolios? Even though the GIMP is excellent, Photoshop is the anointed standard. This is similar when dealing in the CAD arena, one speaks AutoCAD [1], or they don't play.
[1]: Perhaps SolidWorks and CATIA for CNC stuff as a small exception.
Adobe, like Intuit and Microsoft, has worked for decades to establish a dominant position in their market. They are entitled to milk it as hard as they want, reap the benefits and suffer the consequences. I've seen drug companies do the same with drugs protected by patents. Once they establish an installed base with a dependency, they raise their prices, sometimes ten- to fifty-fold. Their customers have fewer options, too. Of course, once the patent rights expire, the drug price drops like a rock. Adobe walks a fine line, seeing pressure from public domain programs like gimp and competitors like Microsoft. They do it their way at the risk of someone offering an easier/cheaper alternative. The cost of their software is not just the product price. Many spend far more on training. CS5 is very complex and not many know it end-to-end. Actually, they benefit from the high cost, as those who have mastered it can earn a good living off it. There is a whole ecosystem behind keeping this business model.
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tl;dr
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The newer versions also seem to get more and more bloated and require more powerful computers to do the same stuff as previous versions of the software. I've never understood this. And the fact that each new version breaks compatability of older file versions with the new software version is a nasty tactic. Professional designers are forced to upgrade whether or not they can afford to, or indeed want to. This applies both to the hardware and software. On the Mac, you must have an Intel processor to use the latest version of Adobe CS!
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Nikon and Canon don't write plugins for Adobe products, either. Adobe writes them, and they don't even have full access to RAW specs, as camera manufactures keep them proprietary and secret. Most of it is reverse-engineered, with some (unknown) data simple being unused by Adobe products.
If GIMP developers went through the same effort of reverse-engineering formats, they'd be able to support them, too. Although, I still don't see many serious professionals using GIMP -- the difference in other features and performance is just too great.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
Honestly it's not the feature sets that put me off. I bought Photoshop, knowing full-well that Gimp and Elements probably do 99% of what I need, and that I'd have to dual-boot or VM a windows install to use it. It didn't matter though. While I know they're technically good, they're both just so painful to use. Yes, I'm sure a lot of it has to do with what I'm used to... but with numerous attempts, I can't get used to gimp. It's like knowing I can build a house with a hammer and chainsaw. The functionality is all there, it just isn't worth the aggravation.
Inkscape, otoh, works very comfortably. I think there's been a lot more thought there from the ground up.
The same reason software companies give their software away for free for Universities to use, and having cheap "educational" copies...
Its not out of the goodness of their hearts. Its because they know that the more people that know how to use their product will help decide what products business will use in the future.
Sage, the makers of Simply Accounting (a popular small business accounting program in Canada), are perhaps even worse. Not only are the different years incompatible but the different patches each year are also incompatible. Even more troublesome is the fact that the program throws no errors when one tries to load a company file from a previous generation, it just instantly closes.
In order for accountants to access your data they have to know exactly which version of the program you're running. I'm sure Sage makes thousands from frustrated accountants just telling customers they're going to need to upgrade to the latest version.
Nikon and Canon don't write plugins for Adobe products, either. Adobe writes them, and they don't even have full access to RAW specs, as camera manufactures keep them proprietary and secret. Most of it is reverse-engineered, with some (unknown) data simple being unused by Adobe products.
If GIMP developers went through the same effort of reverse-engineering formats, they'd be able to support them, too. Although, I still don't see many serious professionals using GIMP -- the difference in other features and performance is just too great.
There's no need to reverse-engineer anything. Anyone involved with processing photos already knows about dcraw which is used to turn RAW files into something usable. In fact, Adobe uses it in Photoshop, as does practically everyone else except the camera manufacturers.
Now, they all modify the code as they think they have a better Bayer interpolation code than everyone else, but that's their perogative. (RAW images are just raw sensor data plus metadata).
Ah it's good to get my daily SlashKos dose, where there's always a featured story about how stealing is justified because of teh evil capitalismz0rz!!
If you were to become educated on the topic you'd suddenly not see as many crazy people about.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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Consider also the Tacoma Narrows fiasco, now some decades ago, which in my opinion is not a mistake that competent engineers make, but one due to social promotion at the highest levels of our education system
I know you're young, but the social promotion you're talking about didn't start until the 70's and wasn't commonplace until the 90's (I remember kids flunking often enough). The Tacoma Narrows Bridge went wacky in 1940. The engineers who designed and built that bridge were probably taught in 1910-1935. They're the great-great-grandparents of the spoiled "everyone wins" generation.
The Minnesota I-35W bridge collapse is indeed a symptom of our inability (or at least shortsighted unwillingness) to maintain our infrastructure. But the Tacoma Narrows (a.k.a. "Galloping Gertie") collapse happened in 1940 -- that's before the "empire" you claim is declining even existed! (The United States became a "superpower" during/after/because of WW2.)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
And you know the most funny part of that ? Adobe is not even aware that it is working this way ! Shareholders do not realize that they are at the mercy of a dumb manager that will one day decide that the next versions of Photoshop will require a constant net access for DRM purpose.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Personally, I find the best feature of CS5 to be that trial expiry no longer works. Every time it starts on my PC, it claims I've got 30 days left to evaluate, then when it finally actually starts it claims the trial has expired but I can run it *just one more time*.
Rinse and repeat.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
I fucking HATE Sage. They bought up a company and software called The Medical Manager that I used to support here in town for the local Docs, and once they did that the service went to absolute dog-shit. It was originally Unix-based and very stable but when Sage took over they developed a new Windows-only version and since then all my old clients have dropped them and gone with one of the 300+ competitors.
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I bet that Dmitri Skylarov has a different opinion.
Anybody want a peanut?
Every time you tools play along and facilitate this stuff, you're helping create the problem.
Doesn't matter whether its Office, CS, or something else. If I can't plunk down 200-300$ and get a workable suite, I'm going to stay away.
Seriously, how hard can it be to not upgrade. If you're working on a huge project in-house, don't upgrade your software half-way through, unless you're prepared to update all copies of it.
InDesign, the software mentioned in the article, will automatically upgrade the format of the document when opened in a new version with no warning. This can be a problem. It also does allow you to downsave by one version (CS5 can save as InDesign Interchange format, which will open in CS4. CS4 to INX for CS3).
If you have the Creative Suite, you really should be on volume licensing - even if it's just one copy. It's not a well known fact, but individuals can purchase volume licensing and there is no minimum buy-in to their TLP licensing program. Licensing copies are cheaper than retail box copies, you can re-download your installers if you lose them, Adobe keep a record of your serial number/proof of purchase if you loose it or are audited and you can purchase maintenance if you want to keep your copies up-to-date for less than the regular upgrade cost.
Also, with licensing, if you purchase a copy of, say, CS5, but you're running all CS4 licenses in your studio, you can install a copy of CS4 instead using your CS4 volume license serial number.
There's no arguing that the Creative Suite is expensive, but if you're smart about it, you can keep the costs down a bit.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
What's more, not only does piracy on the personal level help Adobe with becoming, or staying as, the industry standard, but they are pretty flexible with personal use of the software too.
If, for example, your workplace has purchased site licensing for Adobe software, and you have a copy installed on your workstation - you are allowed to (legally) install the same suite of software on your personal computer at home (for as long as you are employed there and have the suite on your work computer).
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/Cameras.html
Capitalism is wonderful but is amoral, and there is no moral reason to be a sheep in a pack of wolves.
It's OK to do anything you can get away with. The little people get away with little things, while our masters feast and get away with large things. If they make it too onerous for us, we can rise and kill them. If not, we do their will in return for shiny objects.
I LIKE shiny objects.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Office 2010 Home and Student costs 150 USD and includes Word, Excel, Powerpoint and One Note.
If you're on the last month of a four-year project with a deadline and you upgrade vital software, you're an idiot either way. The software was good enough to get you this far; if you thought you needed those new features in order to finish then you were taking a ridiculous gamble in the first place.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
Adobe applies way more DRM than most companies - it's just really easy to get around if you know what you're doing. Like most DRM implementations, it only really hampers the people who have paid for the software. The rest of us spent fifteen seconds sending requests to adobe's activation servers to the void thanks to a couple entries in /etc/hosts.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Adobe applies way more DRM than most companies - it's just really easy to get around if you know what you're doing. Like most DRM implementations, it only really hampers the people who have paid for the software. The rest of us spent fifteen seconds sending requests to adobe's activation servers to the void thanks to a couple entries in /etc/hosts.
And you've disproved my point... how? :-)
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
It's just what you're used to in my opinion. I taught myself with GIMP and used it for a couple years. When I tried to do something on my friends computer using Photoshop I couldn't figure out where anything was.
I too was tempted to say, "Photoshop has a terrible interface," but I realized it was just terrible for me because it's not what I'm used to.
I also find that macs have a God awful user interface, but I assume that's just because I'm so used to Windows.
Not the software, but the file format.
A former engineer at our company ran into a problem- his 'mac' produced help files would only work in version 1.0 of the context software, and the minimum upgrade was to 3.1. 3.0 was the last version that was backwards compatible with 1.0.
In short, it was a cluster f.... but he solved it brilliantly.
Looking at the header of the file... he discovered that the FIRST damn byte was off by 1 hex code. So all of the tech support calls, all of the demands for fixing this- all of these issues and being told there was NO WAY to make the earlier files compatible with the most recent ... were bullshit. He hex-edited the old files and they worked perfectly fine.
I wish he still worked for us instead of being laid off. His intelligence is missed.
I wholeheartedly agree that Adobe's too-frequent release schedule and backward compatibility issues is a real pain. I keep three versions on my Mac to deal with that silliness. But the story was wrong in one respect. The author said that they saved an InDesign CS3 file in CS4 and then couldn't send it back to the original designer. There is a standard way in all Adobe apps to this, and it's been there for all of InDeisgn's versions at least. It's not intuitive though: You have to export the layout (not save as) to a file format first called InDesign Interchange and later IDML. That file is readable by the previous version of InDesign, so you can share between any two levels (CS2 and CS3, or CS3 and CS4, or CS4 and CS5). But you can't do this across more than immediately adjacent levels, such as between CS3 and CS5 or CS2 and CS5. The lack of intuitiveness is probably mean to encourage upgrades.
There is a negative for Adobe in all of this. At work, a license snafu meant I lost my license to InDesign CS3 (it was transferred to another user accidentally). IT said they could buy me the current version (CS5) but that would mean I couldn't exchange files with my colleagues. Adobe had no way to get the older version. So, my choice was to live without InDesign or to have my company upgrade several other users at a cost of more than $2,000 (since we're talking Creative Suite upgrades). At that price, I'm living without InDesign at my office,
Raw is still an adjective, not an acronym. There's nothing magical about NEF or CR2 or other raw files - they're akin to a glorified TIFF. Processing software appears to sometimes have subtle differences in how it goes about demosaicing, but I don't see where there's anything unused -- hence the term "raw". There exists freeware raw processing software. The ACR people are friendly with the dev, and have collaborated at times.
Install the trial version of CS5 straight from adobe's site, use a "borrowed key" from a warez site, block a few adobe activation addresses in /etc/hosts and bob's ya sister. No cracks needed and it will run happily forever amen...
They (Adobe) defined Norway as a "High cost country", and doubled the prices here compared to say, the US.
They charge us $5436 for the CS5 Master Collection. Same pack, same site, US web shop: $2599
Our poor neighbors in Sweden are charged almost $6100
Seems like their trying to take back their entire loss to "piracy" through charging us the double.
With a pricing policy like that, it hardly seems strange that someone would elect _not_ to pay'em.
In Adobes case, there are a lot of potential users that have to start out as pirates to actually learn how to use their software, so at a later stage they could buy it.
I know personally that you can defeat the security in CS2. And when I installed it legitimately I did not have to call anyone.
On the flip side, I don't use any Adobe any more. The last holdout was Acrobat. I can get done what I need to get done with GS and Inkscape, today. Scribus-NG replaced InDesign for me some time ago. The Gimp has replaced Photoshop for me completely for even longer. (It's true I'm not doing prepress.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The United States became a "superpower" during/after/because of WW2.
The USA has been involved in empire building since before it even existed. First it spread like a terrible skin infection across this nation, deforesting and committing genocide. Then it immediately began leaning on its weaker neighbors to the south, bombarding them navally to induce specific economic activity.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I explain that these programs are really free as in freedom, respecting you as a person and not calling you a criminal for not paying arbitrarily high prices
Most people, in a professional setting at least, don't really care about that (especially as it's not their money that's paying for it)...
offer most of the functionality you need for most projects
...but that they do care about. If I have a choice between two pieces of software, one that does everything I need and one that doesn't, I am not going to want to be at work longer because I have the latter rather than the former.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Most people, in a professional setting at least, don't really care about that (especially as it's not their money that's paying for it)...
A lot of design does not happen in a "professional setting". It is done by freelancers, and small shops, and before they are that they are students and trying to build up a portfolio. I am discussing their insistence on Adobe products, when in that situation where it is their money, and they don't have a lot of it, the no cost part of free software does matter. The freedom part of free software matters too because there is mutual respect in place.
Yes, if you are working for a big company that can afford it, then software and cost decisions don't matter to the individual employee, it all just magically appears on your desk. But these independents do need to integrate their work with the workflow of these bigger places, and that is how Adobe has everyone convinced other things are not worth their time. I can certainly appreciate the sentiment, it takes time to learn something else, and most people just want their tools to get out of the way. The free alternatives sometimes need to improve their UI to reduce the learning curve for someone coming from the Adobe world. The proof is in the work though, and if good design is created with these tools, and people know it, I think it gives a stronger reason for people to give it a 2nd look. A few cool kids can do a lot to improve the popularity of a group.
The free alternatives are not perfect or right for every project. Not having to sneak around with cracks, etc, or break the bank, I think is a strong plus.
Copyright infringment is NOT piracy. Piracy is ship to ship armed robbery, kidnapping and murder.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Corel bought Jasc PSP in 2004, not Adobe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint_Shop_Pro
95%, if not more, of people using Photoshop don't need it. We tried for a major push for Adobe Elements at one place I worked at, but a lot of people wanted Photoshop just because it was the "grown up"/Real product.
Without this delusion they have in fact most company workers could do all the same work with GIMP (or even non-commercial quality software) and would probably need only part of features anyway... Especially with GIMP, which would be free in money and as in freedom. But damn those delusions.