Ask Slashdot: What Is Your View On Forced Subscription-Only Software?

dryriver writes: All used to be well in the world of Digital Content Creation (DCC) until two very major DCC software makers -- Adobe and Autodesk -- decided to force a monthly subscription model on pretty much every software package they make to please Wall Street investors. Important 2D and 3D DCC software like Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere, InDesign, 3DMax, Maya, and Mudbox is now only available to "rent" from these companies. You simply cannot buy a perpetual license or boxed copy for this software at all anymore, and what makes matters worse is that if you stop paying your subscription, the software locks itself down, leaving you unable to open even old files you created with the software for later review. Also annoying is that subscription software constantly performs "license validity" checks over the internet (subscription software cannot be run offline for any great length of time, or on an air-gapped PC) and the software is increasingly tied into various cloud services these companies have set up. The DCC companies want you to save your -- potentially confidential -- project files on their servers, not on your own hard disk.

There are millions of DCC professionals around the world who'd love to be able to buy a normal, perpetual, offline-use capable license for these software tools. That is no longer possible. Adobe and Autodesk no longer provide that. What is your view on this "forced subscription" model? What would happen if all the major commercial software developers forced this model on everyone simultaneously? What if the whole idea of being able to "purchase" a perpetual license for ANY commercial software went away completely, and it was subscription only from that point on?

Comments

In Favor

[Anonymous Coward]

I can guess how this is going to go ./ Pretty much everyone will be fully supportive.

Re:In Favor

[loonycyborg]

I think the advantage here is mostly for the developers. They want to make a predictable, dependable stream of income. Previously they had to make new versions of software to make people pay again but that resulted in bad updates and lot of redoing things from scratch, just for sake of making a new version so people would pay again. With subscription model they can stop making major updates every 2-5 years and enjoy their steady rent without doing much beside maintenance.

Re:In Favor

[jenningsthecat]

... And if money becomes tight, I can switch to LibreOffice (whom I regularly donate a small penny to).

If you could use LibreOffice "if money becomes tight", why not use it now?

Re:In Favor

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux should go the subscription model.

Re:In Favor

[hazardPPP]

Anyone who has attempted to use LibreOffice or GIMP for professional work will tell you the same thing: they are not suited for any kind of professional work. Adobe and the rest switched to this business model because they know users will have no choice.

I have used and currently use LibreOffice for professional work and it works just fine. To say that it is "not suited for any kind of professional work" is just plain false. As in not true. As in - a lie. There is lots of professional work LibreOffice is suited just fine for. For sure, there are things it cannot do, or cannot do well. It's not a perfect replacement for Microsoft Office. However, there is a lot of professional work you can do with it.

GIMP I can't comment on, I really haven't used that program much in any capacity (professional or otherwise).

Re:In Favor

[Kierthos]

My biggest problem with GIMP (or at least the GIMP of four years ago) is that it feels just enough like Photoshop to get you feeling that it shouldn't be a problem to use. However, there's enough differences where, coming off of a decade of using Photoshop at work, you end up muttering "Ok, what is the damn shortcut for that function?"

Re: In Favor

[Anonymous Coward]

Itâ(TM)s in the next version of systemd.

Re: In Favor

[roundart]

Are you joking? I make 95% of my living with software from these two companies.

Re:In Favor

[AvitarX]

I find the fact that everybody as the same version of creative suite a huge benefit for working with people from outside my company.

We used to upgrade every other to third version, some customers every version, others even further apart. It was a nightmare.

We switched the to sub model on an upgrade cycle and it was break even for 2 upgrade cycles (4 versions) and costs about 20% more now, but never a large expense at once, never a struggle to share files.

If they didn't force it on everyone else, the value would not be as high.

Re:In Favor

[morethanapapercert]

To be fair though, if you had used GIMP for the past decade and had recently switched to Photoshop, you'd still be muttering "where's the shortcut for this?"

My personal criticism of GIMP is that even some basic stuff is ever so slightly different than how Photoshop does it. Just different enough to avoid copyright infringement is also different enough that many entry level user tutorials don't work and comparable versions of specialized plugins just don't exist.

Re: In Favor

[Z00L00K]

It's systemd you'd have to subscribe to then.

Re:In Favor

[cayenne8]

My biggest problem with GIMP (or at least the GIMP of four years ago) is that it feels just enough like Photoshop to get you feeling that it shouldn't be a problem to use. However, there's enough differences where, coming off of a decade of using Photoshop at work, you end up muttering "Ok, what is the damn shortcut for that function?"

Take a look at Affinity Photo...it is pretty much 99% there with PS and MUCH faster engine too. Reasonably priced and perpetual license.

They've also been going free updates for years now...

I've played with GIMP too, and while it has it's uses, it is missing some stuff, AND, like you said, if you're used to a PS workflow with keyboard shortcuts, etc...it is a PITA.

Affinity Photo is laid out almost identically to PS for the most part and you keyboard shortcuts are mostly all there too...you can remap the ones that aren't and off you go.

Re: In Favor

[Z00L00K]

With subscription that rate would decrease. Just look at how many SAP customers that now have problems making ends meet due to the horrible rates SAP charges.

Re:In Favor

[Anonymous Coward]

*scrolling down the page*

Looks like your opinion on their opinions didn't pan out ;)

There are benefits (anyone who has had to chase up users for serial#'s etc can appreciate vendor side tracking of this stuff) - but the locking down with DRM etc is a pain in the ass.

There's really two conflicting interests - squeezing out as much money as possible by making piracy difficult (ie, users sharing those serial#'s) and convenience of not having to deal with DRM.

Personally I'd be happy with a vendor side license site with the serials with concurrent serial# use limits with those serial#'s able to be reassigned.Of course the pirate community would just bit patch the authentication stuff out...

Re:In Favor

[ctilsie242]

LibreOffice is just as good as MS office for virtually any task. The only time issues arise is that it is 99.99% compatible with Word/Excel/etc. However, that 0.01% can mean issues, especially with a complex Excel spreadsheet, a Word document with a ton of formatting, and so on. However, for most tasks, they are pretty much interchangeable.

Re:In Favor

[Anonymous Coward]

try krita

Re:In Favor

[Anonymous Coward]

In Soviet Russia, systemd subscribes to you!

Re:In Favor

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do idiots keeps recommending Krita as a replacement? Krita is a painting application and does not serve the same purpose as Gimp or PhotoShop.

Re:In Favor

[vtcodger]

I suppose there are projects -- blasting mankind back to the stone age for example -- where presumed lower costs of rental outweigh the risks that the software you are locked into will become inaccessible, unusable, or extortionately expensive. But in general, depending on rental software without guarantees of perpetual good behavior from its purveyor strikes me as being exceedingly imprudent. Therefore I project that the idea will be exceedingly popular amongst MBAs and similar lower life forms.

Re:In Favor

[Anonymous Coward]

I checked their site but they don't mention OS support anywhere. The Affinity Photo article on Wikipedia says it only supports Mac OS, iOS and Windows 10.

That's a shame, since I use Windows 7. I guess I'll stick with PaintShop Pro.

Re:In Favor

[vtcodger]

No offense, but aren't Excel macros (VBA based, right?) a bit of a problem in Libre Office? IIRC, Libre Office macros are sort of Pythonish -- which is fine with me. But I would think that would be a problem with financial folk who, in my experience, love spreadsheets, and often have huge supply of pet VBA macros that they love more than their own children. The problem here is that in the places I worked, the financial folks were heavily involved in the decision making process and they are unlikely to embrace a "solution" that causes them a lot of grief.

Perhaps the world has moved on and that's no longer a problem? I sure hope so.

Re:In Favor

[Dutch Gun]

Affinity Photo looks pretty nice, and for a great price. I've used Corel PhotoPaint for years, and as far as I can tell, it pretty much has feature parity with Photoshop. It has the benefit of coming with CorelDraw, a vector illustration program, which I find useful for some design work.

It doesn't really matter, though. The artists who have used PS for years will continue to use PS, because that's what they've been using forever. And new artists are trained on PS because "that's what everyone uses". Honestly, I'm not sure that the Adobe near-monopoly will ever be broken, or at least in the foreseeable future. Same with Autodesk software.

Re:In Favor

[Dutch Gun]

These subscription models aren't bad for businesses which use these products. When you employ 100 artists, like at a major game studio, it's probably easier to simply rent your creative software. It's not like there's any question about using something else. Likewise, it's perhaps not bad for an individual who makes a living with that software. It's easier to pay a lower rental fee each month than worrying about bigger upgrade costs.

Where it really hurts is for people who want to learn, or dabble, or who are using it part-time for fun. Previously, you could just pick up a version and use it forever. The upfront cost was high, but you know you could use that from then on. Now, you're in it monthly, and when you stop paying, you can't use it. It's also harder for people who are fine with buying a version and then using that version for the next decade or so. For instance, I'm using MS Office 2010, and it's perfectly fine. I've go zero incentive to upgrade, and will probably wait until it's no longer supported by security patches.

Re:In Favor

[tepples]

That would at least require some workaround for lack of support for macros in third-party XLSM workbooks. For example, Amazon's "Listing Loader", a product offer feed prevalidator provided by Amazon to third-party sellers on its platform, is an Excel workbook with macros. Without the prevalidator, the only way to validate your product offer information against Amazon's schema is to try uploading it, and a failed upload counts against your seller account's upload quota.

Re:In Favor

[AvitarX]

Office was already insanely cheap for individuals too (once OO became possible 10-15 years ago).

Going from $100 to $7/month is much more of an increase than $1500 to $50/month, or $700 to $10/month (current Photoshop only sub price).

I find it hard to believe that such a casual user would really find benifits from Photoshop vs something like photo deluxe or some other simple photo editor though. They'd probably be better served by the simple one with nice tools for backlight reduction, red eye reduction, face smooth, Instagram style filters, etc. Even.

Re:In Favor

[networkBoy]

While this may be true, I have not upgraded any of my adobe creative suite tools past the last perpetual licensed version I own. Ever since then I've been learning the open source replacements for everything I do. Not as easy, or as integrated, but I refuse to be hostage to a sub that prevents me from accessing prior work without current payment.
If they had a "reader" version of all their tools that allowed the basic functionality then *maybe* but as it is now? No.

Re:In Favor

[Oligonicella]

That ellipsis you used? It removed the sentence immediately preceding the one you quoted which is the answer to your query:

I get to always have the latest copy with security patches and bug fixes.

This is something LO simply does not do. I use OO and every time LO issues an upgrade I download it and look for the bugs I hate the most in the both. There are blatant bugs that haven't been fixed since the split. Same bugs in both OO and LO.

Re:In Favor

[networkBoy]

This is the boat I'm in with Adobe CS. I won't be upgrading past CS3 ever because that's what I own and I'm not a professional, I just happen to really enjoy making "high end" home movies and such.

Re:In Favor

[Heathren-bert]

Near the bottom of this page has the system requirements https://affinity.serif.com/en-... Needs service pack 1, and aero enabled.

Re:In Favor

[ilsaloving]

If your needs are limited to word processing, then Writer is mostly sufficient if buggy. Calc is similarly ok.

But everything else? Completely and utter shit. Impress is so shockingly bad that they should be embarrassed to include it in the package. The slides look like they were made by something from the 90s, half the transition effects render shockingly jerky and ugly, and the other half don't render at all. I've confirmed this on my Mac as well as a test Ubuntu install I happened to be experimenting with.

Add to the fact that I've repeatedly had issues trying to create and print a document in landscape, which one would think should be a standard feature, I have to concur with the AC. I don't see how anyone could consider LibreOffice suitable for professional use.

Re:In Favor

[Heathren-bert]

Does Affinity Photo have a Bridge type interface so you can view your images to decide which ones you want to process?

Re:In Favor

[ilsaloving]

Correction. It doesn't seem to be exhibiting the landscape issue in the version I now have installed. But that was still a *massive* piss-off when it was happening. It's the kind of inexcusable bug that should never have happened in the first place, and makes it very hard to trust the software for anything important.

Re:In Favor

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks. They really ought to have the information somewhere more discoverable.

Anyhow, bought. I can't pass it up at that price.

Re:In Favor

[Immerman]

An extra $20-$50 per seat per year is enough that you can't afford it? Must either not be very valuable to you - or you need to hire (and listen to) a decent budget manager. Not to mention, a Photoshop business account license is currently $30/month, or $360/year/seat - just *slightly* more than your supposed $20 each for 5 licenses. (5 *installs*, such as in MS Office home edition is not quite same thing, and in that case the license explicitly prohibits you from using it in a business environment. I don't see any such option mentioned on the Adobe site: https://www.adobe.com/creative...)

And frankly, if your profit margins really are that slim then I'd think the perpetual license would be far more attractive, since a bad year would just mean you put off the next upgrade for a year or two and make do using the exact same software that's been getting the job done fine for the last several years. With a subscription you no longer have that option, and are completely at the mercy of the publisher's to not to raise the price and drive you out of business tomorrow.

Bottom line - if a subscription model would actually save you money, then they'd have very little incentive to move to it.

Re:In Favor

[stealth_finger]

I find the fact that everybody as the same version of creative suite a huge benefit for working with people from outside my company.

We used to upgrade every other to third version, some customers every version, others even further apart. It was a nightmare.

We switched the to sub model on an upgrade cycle and it was break even for 2 upgrade cycles (4 versions) and costs about 20% more now, but never a large expense at once, never a struggle to share files.

If they didn't force it on everyone else, the value would not be as high.

And now you're all paying for it, all the time with no real option of stopping. Who really wins here?

Re:In Favor

[Immerman]

It mostly already is. I pay the full purchase price every month. Rather painful at $0,000.00 per year, but I'm pretty that if I miss a payment they'll reformat my computer after sharing the most embarrassing samples from my porn stash with everyone I know.

There's also support contracts from many different providers, which are typically sold in a subscription model as well - generally more expensive than Linux itself, but it's a strictly optional expenditure, and usually gets you much more responsive support than you'd get from most large software publishers.

Re:In Favor

[cayenne8]

I checked their site but they don't mention OS support anywhere. The Affinity Photo article on Wikipedia says it only supports Mac OS, iOS and Windows 10.

That's a shame, since I use Windows 7. I guess I'll stick with PaintShop Pro.

Yeah, it is not easy to find, but here are the system requirements.

It looks like it will run Win 7 for you.

HTH.

Re:In Favor

[SScorpio]

But reader only exists to allow the consumption of documents created in full Acrobat.

Not all Adobe products would be able to support having a free reader version.

In the case of Photoshop and Premiere they do offer an Elements home user targeted version that is a boxed perpetual license. These allow photo and video editing while stripping out some professional only features.

What other Adobe products would you use, that are sub only?

Re:In Favor

[Immerman]

Is GIMPshop still a thing? I recall it being a "reskinned" version of GIMP modified to look more like Photoshop.and use the same hotkeys. Of course I had already spent most of my time in normal GIMP, so a prettier interface wasn't worth relearning the hotkeys. Especially since you never know how long such side branches will be maintained.

I'd have to say that the biggest advantage of GIMP is that you can use the same program on every computer you use, with no worrying about licenses, costs, or (mostly) operating system support or differences. For 90+% of people who really only use Photoshop as an occasional glorified basic photo editor, that alone probably makes it the smarter skill investment. If you're a professional graphic artist, then maybe Photoshop caters to your needs enough to make it worth the trouble, GIMP certainly has some shortcomings in that realm, but that's a tiny minority of users.

Meanwhile, the biggest disadvantage is probably, as ever, the extremely unflattering name.

Re:In Favor

[cayenne8]

The artists who have used PS for years will continue to use PS, because that's what they've been using forever. And new artists are trained on PS because "that's what everyone uses". Honestly, I'm not sure that the Adobe near-monopoly will ever be broken, or at least in the foreseeable future.

Well, the nice thing about Affinity, for the most part, it is laid out exactly like PS, with pretty much the same keyboard shortcuts...if you know PS, the AP is like working with the same old friend.

Re:In Favor

[cayenne8]

Does Affinity Photo have a Bridge type interface so you can view your images to decide which ones you want to process?

No...but Bridge is a different application.

I currently use LR5 to bring my images in and work them before sending to PS or Affinity.

I'm also now evaluating On1 RAW to replace LR....to sort through images, develop...etc.....then send to Affinity for the heavy lifting needs.

Re:In Favor

[avandesande]

GIMP doesn't really support CMYK so it is useless for print work.

Re:In Favor

[Spamalope]

I'm doing exactly the same thing. I went through a few versions of lightroom but I'm done with that too. I haven't bought/upgraded CS since Adobe cut off camera raw updates as a bait-n-switch 1 month after I bought. They advertised the availability of camera raw updates with CS3, then canceled them forever before I got even one. As a casual user, my response was to never buy again rather than pay the upgrade fee for the entire suite just to get the raw update.

Re:In Favor

[apoc.famine]

Perhaps the world has moved on and that's no longer a problem? I sure hope so.

Not that I'm aware of. But if moving to Libre Office would force the insane practice of running a business on the back of someone's pet Excel macros, not backed up, obtuse to everyone else, fragile, and prone to compatibility issues to die, I think we'd all be better off moving to Libre Office.

Hire a damn developer to write some functional code with comments residing in a CVS that's backed up. That would be far safer and more reasonable than letting the financial folks continue with the macro shenanigans.

Re:In Favor

[mencik]

As a home user, my copy of Office 2013 still works just fine for me. There just aren't enough new bells and whistles that I "need" in any of the newer releases. I see no reason to spend additional money.

Re:In Favor

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing that annoys me about GIMP is that the last real release was FIVE years ago. Finish tinkering on the non-release 2.9s and give the world a 2.10. Or better yet, a 3.x.

Re:In Favor

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, on a site that used to be for IT people and still brands itself as "news for nerds," there seem to be shockingly few programmers.

About four years ago, I was working on an application that had used Office automation for over a decade. The bulk of it was filling in Word templates for forms/letters, to which I'd added a few Excel and Outlook features, but overall nothing particularly complex. When we updated from Office 2000 to XP, it hiccupped. When we updated from XP to 2010 (XML Everywhere Edition), it nearly choked.

That's when I started reading all of the hand-wringing from Microsoft about how bad it was to use automation. Never mind that most of the reasons are to protect stupid developers from themselves. For example, if you pass the parameters in to not show dialogs, they don't pop up and hang the server.

Anyway, I thought, OK, if I have to update this application with every forced Office update, I'll make it run on the OpenOffice API too. Yeah, no. Poor documentation and missing features everywhere. Could not even translate over the templating features because CustomDocumentProperties and the like still weren't implemented.

Oh, I know, "hur dur itz open source so just contribute to teh projekt!" Yeah, no, I don't have time to decipher your spaghetti or work my way through your social circles. I need a working product now and you don't have one.

How the hell is that drop-in replacement for anybody's workflow? There _are_ workflows beyond manually reading/e-mailing/printing documents. I haven't looked at OO for years but I've used Office 2016 and with all of the nearly useless sharing/collaboration feature I'd be very surprised if OO was even on the same planet anymore.

Also...subscription models suck. They're hostage taking treadmills of mediocrity. Explains alot about the current state of software.

Re:In Favor

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL @ "print work"

Go back to 1995.

Re:In Favor

[unrtst]

Previously they had to make new versions of software to make people pay again ...

Previously, they had real competition. They bought many of those. Corel is still around, and was used in many shops back in the day (I have no idea of the current status in the industry). Macromedia had Flash and a better HTML editor than Adobe had at the time, and was adding additional tools pretty quickly before Adobe acquired and squashed them. Corel Draw was easily on par with Adobe Illustrator for a little while. Corel Paint was somewhere between GIMP and Photoshop. Corel WordPerfect was a decent replacement for Microsoft Office. I'm a bit surprised to see they're still around at all, cause I never hear about them anymore.

The subscription only stuff has a huge upper hand now. Previously, when you were 1 or 2 versions behind, you'd look at those upgrade prices, and get to consider your options.... maybe having a new copy of the competitions software and keeping your 2 years old Adobe version would make more sense than simply upgrading the Adobe version, especially if you're in a shop so you can handle more file formats from customers? Now, you're always on the latest version, and your cost this year will almost certainly be less than a new full version from the competition, and you can't justify dropping the current subscription because all your work is in it.

It's a really good lock down strategy, so long as they get enough people locked in. And they can always lure people back with free versions and trials and such.

Re:In Favor

[dgatwood]

The problem is that nobody wants a stripped-down "Lite" version, or at least nobody who has ever used the real product. There are too many things that don't work... like CMYK.

So if my choices are switching from Photoshop CS6 to Elements or switching to Pixelmator, the latter has more functionality, but not a lot more, so it mostly comes down to a choice between buying yet another product from a company that had now screwed me twice by taking away my ability to upgrade software that I've spent thousands of dollars on over the years or telling them to go f**k themselves and switching to another piece of software from a company that hasn't been abusive.

Needless to say, I own Pixelmator, and do not own any version of Elements. So I will continue to maintain CS6 for working on old projects, and will continue to do so until an OS upgrade breaks it beyond repair, at which point I'll stick it in an OS X v10.6 virtual machine right alongside AppleWorks.

The recent Lightroom announcement was particularly heinous, because they previously promised that they wouldn't be doing that, and I bought LR6 based on the promise that they were eventually going to add full support for the 5D Mark IV's dual-pixel RAW. Now, a year later, they still haven't added that support, and have dropped the standalone product entirely. Had they not deliberately lied to us a year ago, I would have spent time adding that support to DarkTable, and would have saved a lot of money instead of wasting it on a dead-end product that still doesn't fully meet my needs.

After the recent Lightroom announcement, Adobe is officially dead to me. They could literally create technology that would end world hunger, cure all diseases, and store a day worth of video in a single megabyte, and I still wouldn't give them a penny for any of it. They have made my permanent blacklist—one of only two companies ever to earn that honor. Nothing they could possibly do matters at this point. They're simply another technology company on life support. And I sure as h*** won't pay subscription fees to keep them on life support. The company failed in the marketplace. Let it die.

Re:In Favor

[diesalesmandie]

On other note, we do need more competition and the need to continue to strengthen free alternatives like GNU/Linux, LibreOffice, NextCloud, GIMP, VLC, etc. So please send a small penny to your favorite free software each year if you can. It will keep your commercial proprietary software in check if possible, and save you more money in the long run.

Gonna sound like a troll (if I was I'd post AC) but come back to me when LibreOffice has the same if not more functionality than Microsoft Excel. Sure MS have changed the layout several times and have even broken macro spreadsheets with some iterations of Excel but they aren't the only ones guilty of doing this (not to sound like an apologist).

Say what you want about excel but its pretty handy for a lot of things (but the vast majority of credit goes to Dan Bricklin who invented VisiCalc).

Re:In Favor

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't knock maintenance. Maintenance is hard.

I've previously estimated that at least 90% of software engineers who think they're doing software development - professionally, I mean - are in fact doing maintenance. Any non-trivial piece of software that gets deployed on more than one system is going to need maintenance, and it doesn't take many installs before the maintenance work greatly exceeds the effort that went into writing it in the first place.

Brian Kernighan explained why this is: "Debugging is twice as hard as writing code in the first place". And new bugs emerge all the time, especially if the software keeps getting repurposed and deployed in new environments.

Re:In Favor

[ceoyoyo]

There are studies that show complicated Excel spreadsheets are so buggy (and hard to debug) that they're not really any better than random number generators.

You're correct: Excel has too many features, and it makes things deceptively easy.

Re:In Favor

[Anonymous Coward]

Corel WordPerfect was a decent replacement for Microsoft Office. I'm a bit surprised to see they're still around at all, cause I never hear about them anymore.

I did some freelance IT work for some attorneys, nearly all of whom use WordPerfect. It's apparently what the law industry has (mostly) standardized on

Re:In Favor

[dwywit]

Photoshop has many output formats that are freely readable, even editable, by other products - JPG, TIFF, PNG, etc. Ditto Illustrator, Premiere Pro and Audition.

InDesign can export to Acrobat - but it's really a program to produce printed content, and your eyes are the "reader".

I can see the benefits in subscription software however I'm happy with my CS6, the last perpetual licenced version. When that stops working because of a Windows update, I'll evaluate my options at that time, but I'll probably run it in a Win 7 VM.

Re:In Favor

[dwywit]

Casual users can still buy Photoshop elements - which looks like Photoshop, and will do what nearly all casual users require. If and when they move on from casual to serious/professional use, they'll be familiar with it, and the monthly payment won't break the bank.

Re: In Favor

[dwywit]

There are viable alternatives to SAP.

Re:In Favor

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather painful at $0,000.00 per year

You got off light! I pay â000,000.00 for my enterprise licences, and that doesn't even include VAT!

Re:In Favor

[amxcoder]

I run MS Office on my main laptop, but run Libre Office on my secondary laptops used in the field, and I have noticed lots of little idiosyncrasies with using files between the two platforms.

I'm not doing anything like embedding VBA or macros or anything either, but rather mundane stuff that seems to fudged when I open in LO from the original MS-Office suite. The problems were present in both older OpenOffice versions, as well as newer Libre Office as well. For the most part, it works in a pinch, and if starting from scratch in OO or LO, you'll probably be fine, but I wouldn't say that the success rate is 99.99%. I would give it a generous 90-95% at most.

Some of the issues I've had include, working with Word docs that have tables embedded, the tables loose some of column widths, and trying to add-in a table (copied from Spreadsheets) don't come in with the proper column widths and cell borders like they do when using MS Office. Also have had some issues when you have a drawings objects (like 'line') and text boxes not positioning the same as in MS Office. Have had to nudge them around when opening in Libre Writer. Another issue I've ran into is when using 'page headers/footers', have had an issues where the original MS Office was set to all be the same except for the first page, and in Libre, they all seem to be independent of each other, so changing the page header doesn't follow through the whole document and only changes on a single page.

While these aren't big issues that keep you from getting any work done, they are rather annoying none the less, somewhat random, little quirks that seem to be persistent in revisions. And can cause headache and frustration trying to 'fix' them when bringing in a .docx file to make some little unrelated edits.

Re:In Favor

[DCFusor]

Looks good but no Linux support. I DID buy sublime text - not all linux guys are free-only.

Re: In Favor

[Anonymous Coward]

"No offense, but aren't Excel macros (VBA based, right?) a bit of a problem in Libre Office?"

For those that dont use macros (ehich is the vast majority of excel users) and those that experienced the really bad years of macro viruses, thats a pro not a con.

For me personally i never once used macros and that got me through high school, uni and now work and personal financial stuff. For me i wish macro support was an optional feature we could untick during the install process. Why do i have to be at risk of macro viruses when i never use that thing?

Re:In Favor

[amxcoder]

I think your right in that a lot of bigger companies like the subscription. However, I think there are 2 main factors driving the subscription model, especially considering the 2 primary companies that have moved to these SAS models...

1) Adobe CS was highly pirated software, possibly one of the most pirated software suites around. I don't have hard facts or numbers to back this up, but many many people who don't use it for business, can't afford it for casual use, and it's high price helped feed the demand of pirate copies for personal use. I think Adobe likes it because it drastically eliminates the ability to pirate the software when it's constantly calling home and required to be connected to the mother ship to continue to operate. The fact that get stable money month-to-month is another bonus for them, I personally think the piracy issue was one of their leading reasons. Look at how bad they started crippling the software with activation and phoneing home on later releases prior to moving to CC versions.

2) Many of the companies that use tools like these, take photoshop out of the mix a bit, but look at After Effects, PremierPro, and Autodesk Maya/3d Studio and the like from these companies and they are toolsets that are often used in TV and movie production. The paradigm for movie and TV usage is a little different, in that effects houses get contracts to work on these productions for relatively short periods of time. They often bring in contractors or hire when a big movie is in the works, and then when production wraps up, the scale back down in size until the next big project. The industry is notorious for this, especially for big budget movies. In this case, the FX Studio's probably desired to be able to spin up more seats of a particular software package as needed, and then later when done with the big rush of work, spin these seats down again.

With fixed pricing purchases, they would have to pay full price for all the extra seats they might need for 6mos to a year, and then be stuck with them after. By the time the next big project came along, they would need to upgrade to the latest versions and need to re-purchase again for that, even though they might have tons of seat licenses available of the older version. I think this fuels the SAS approach for these software packages very much, as an FX Studio can scale up/down with their project loads, and are always working with the latest greatest and aren't wasting as much money.

With that said, I personally HATE SAS models for software. I WILL NOT RENT my software. I'll look for alternatives before I do that.

Re: In Favor

[Monster_user]

When I bought Microsoft Office 2010, it was 150/3, or $50 per PC. Not too much more expensive than the annual license is now, and the $150 is perpetual.

I suppose The $100 subscription is better if you have a variety of devices (Apple, Android, Windows), and/or more than three devices. Or you have need to update your Office Software regularly for some reason.

Re:In Favor

[networkBoy]

wow, you're more pissed than I am!
What's the other company? I'm dying to know??

Re:In Favor

[dgatwood]

Belkin. I plugged in one of their USB-to-serial adapters and my computer shut off instantly. Apparently, it was dead-shorted across the power pins. That earned them a 5-year ban and a fifteen-year probation.

About seven or eight years after that, my grandparents needed a Wi-Fi router, and that was the only one available locally, so I cringed and gave them another shot. It exhibited crashes under any significant amount of actual traffic—and by "crashes", I mean it stopped passing data and had to be power-cycled several times per day until we tossed it in the trash and replaced it with a ten-year-old, recapped graphite Apple Airport Base Station. That second disaster earned them a permanent spot on my "never again" list.

Other dishonorable mentions go to:

• NETGEAR for their white gigabit switches (the one I got for my house died after a day, with something like 99% packet loss, and then another one at work had to be unplugged once a week because it stopped passing traffic). I'll probably never buy their consumer-grade switches again, but the rest of their gear has always been solid for me, and the failure wasn't dangerous, so they just made my "be cautious and always check Amazon reviews" list.
• Samsung for firmware bugs in their Blu-Ray players that made them stop playing DVDs correctly (rolled back to previous firmware) and stutter on certain Blu-Rays (could not find a working firmware revision, and replaced one of them with an LG), and for still using low-quality electrolytic capacitors all the way up into 2007, which forced me to recap my bedroom TV a couple of weeks ago (and failed for a lot of people many years earlier). They are on my "be very afraid" list.

Re:In Favor

[Anonymous Coward]

The lightroom switch is particularly nasty due to the fact it is both a DAM tool and a non-destructive editor. Whilst I can export XML sidecar files that other systems - Capture One, DarkTable etc - may understand from a metadata perspective my edits are lost as they are unlikely to be translated between applications. This is the really nasty part. Pay up forever or switch and lose thousands of edits. After promising not to do so they are simply scum. At present I am looking to stay with version 6 and use the free DNG converter they offer to do a convert and embed RAW on any newer camera models.

Re:In Favor

[hazardPPP]

Impress is so shockingly bad that they should be embarrassed to include it in the package.

I disagree.

When I make PowerPoint presentations, I really go animation-heavy. It's my thing. Recently I imported a bunch of PowerPoint presentations into Impress, edited them, made new slides, made new animations, saved in odp format and did the presentation in front of an audience of 50 people. Everything went fine.

Yes, the slides look a bit outdated when you are editing them inside Impress, but once you go into full-screen presentation mode, there is hardly any difference. I don't think anybody noticed.

On the other hand, PowerPoint has caused me some embarrassment in front of such audiences. I went to a conference once, and had a .pptx file prepared (due to the animations I use a lot to demonstrate sometimes highly complicated technical concepts and keep people following the story, using a PDF version won't cut it). The chair of the session was using a Mac, so he asked me to load the file on his computer to avoid having to disconnect it from the projector and spend time on connecting my computer. OK, I thought, he had MS Office on his Mac, with PowerPoint, everything should be fine, right?

Wrong. Half my slides were messed up. Some crucial parts. If I open a .pptx file made on Windows in the Mac version of Office (and vice versa), there should be NO difference in the presentation. Everything should look EXACTLY the same. Except that it doesn't. I'm not the only one with this issue.

Re:In Favor

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm in favor because I've already witnessed it pushing more people toward open source alternatives. It's both good for FOSS as well as good for proprietary software. In the latter case, it will be good only after the pressure from people migrating to FOSS offerings, or at least permanently licensed proprietary offerings, starts to make the permanent recurring license model less appealing.

Not saying that permanent recurring license models have to die, in some cases things like Adobe CC and Microsoft's nascent Windows+Office 365 services make sense for businesses because although they are ultimately more expensive than permanent licenses, the fact that the licenses can be added immediately and removed month-to-month makes license management a lot simpler, especially in places with high hardware turnover.

Re: In Favor

[Z00L00K]

Not if you have a management that's already stuck in the SAP swamp. It's worse than any addictive drug you can find.

Re:In Favor

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the second company (to have made the permanent blacklist)?

Re:In Favor

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of the art/layout tools are markedly inferior. It is on par with Office from about 10 years ago. But now that I don't use it at home for work, I let my 365 slide and use LibreOffice.

Re:In Favor

[ilsaloving]

Unfortunately Office for Windows and Office for Mac are two completely different code bases. Which is bloody moronic and inexcusable, I agree. But that's an issue until itself, separate from the LO office I'm talking about.

On my Mac, I literally can't use Impress. It's completely broken. It's also broken on Linux, which is a joke considering that LO is the darling office suite of Linux. Not just "It doesn't work on a different platform". It doesn't work properly right from the start, making it a completely unviable solution (at least for people not on Windows).

So for presentations I use Keynote, which is included for free with every Mac. One nice bonus I recently discovered is that it can export presentations into some wierd webapp format (ostensibly its "HTML", but if you look at the output it's anything but...) that will work nicely in any modern browser.

Re:In Favor

[avandesande]

There is as much print work done now as 1995. Like it or not people aren't going to invest in a image editing platform that doesn't support print.

Re:In Favor

[Anonymous Coward]

eh? Office Student and Home came with 3 install licenses. Let's say "3" because that is a more typical use case than 4. Buying once for $150 versus paying $100 per year until the end of time, which is better? Hm, let me get out my calculator to solve this one.

Also the "upgrades" include shit like the "ribbon." Yes you can turn off the ribbon but then you don't have a formatting palette.

Re:In Favor

[Anonymous Coward]

Well said.

I use Lightroom from a sailboat, not connected to the internet, not connected to land, not connected to any particular continent, so after my LR6 gets too long in the tooth I'll find someone else's product. I don't intend to support Adobe's daydream of stabilizing their revenue.

Re:In Favor

[networkBoy]

Belkin routers are total shit, no other word for it. In fact... I'm not entirely sure if they make anything good.

Re:In Favor

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that nobody wants a stripped-down "Lite" version, or at least nobody who has ever used the real product. There are too many things that don't work... like CMYK.

So if my choices are switching from Photoshop CS6 to Elements or switching to Pixelmator, the latter has more functionality, but not a lot more, so it mostly comes down to a choice between buying yet another product from a company that had now screwed me twice by taking away my ability to upgrade software that I've spent thousands of dollars on over the years or telling them to go f**k themselves and switching to another piece of software from a company that hasn't been abusive.

Needless to say, I own Pixelmator, and do not own any version of Elements. So I will continue to maintain CS6 for working on old projects, and will continue to do so until an OS upgrade breaks it beyond repair, at which point I'll stick it in an OS X v10.6 virtual machine right alongside AppleWorks.

The recent Lightroom announcement was particularly heinous, because they previously promised that they wouldn't be doing that, and I bought LR6 based on the promise that they were eventually going to add full support for the 5D Mark IV's dual-pixel RAW. Now, a year later, they still haven't added that support, and have dropped the standalone product entirely. Had they not deliberately lied to us a year ago, I would have spent time adding that support to DarkTable, and would have saved a lot of money instead of wasting it on a dead-end product that still doesn't fully meet my needs.

After the recent Lightroom announcement, Adobe is officially dead to me. They could literally create technology that would end world hunger, cure all diseases, and store a day worth of video in a single megabyte, and I still wouldn't give them a penny for any of it. They have made my permanent blacklist—one of only two companies ever to earn that honor. Nothing they could possibly do matters at this point. They're simply another technology company on life support. And I sure as h*** won't pay subscription fees to keep them on life support. The company failed in the marketplace. Let it die.

Did you pay with a credit card? You may be able to chargeback Adobe once you remove Lightroom/uninstall it based on their false advertising.

Re:In Favor

[dgatwood]

They gave us Belkin outlet strips at one of my previous employers. Given my experience with their other products, I kept expecting them to catch fire, but miraculously, none of them did.

Re:In Favor

[DarthVain]

While there are pros and cons to both sides, the one con that I think is the worst is a loss of control.

Once you're locked in there is the potential for abuse. i.e. we're going to raise rates, or it'd be a shame if something were to happen to your account etc... Additionally in the same vein, in many cases it is about the upgrade cycle. In the past, releases were more static. Now we see more software getting perpetually patched anyway, to fix issues as software becomes more complex. The downside to that of course is that there have been instances in the past where you would NOT want to upgrade, due to business processes, or compatibility issues etc... Now you are more less forced to, and if you have to adapt (and spend) then too bad.... Some build in some flexibility in this regard, but even they draw a line as to what they are prepared to support.

Re:In Favor

[david_thornley]

Spending $600 every 5 years is only a little more expensive than $100/year, although the latter is easier to budget for. The real downside of subscriptions is that, if your payments lapse, you can wind up with a lot of unusable files. The advantage of MS Office here is that you can usually switch to LibreOffice without problems.

Re:In Favor

[Anonymous Coward]

What happens when the only value add for the next version is new incompatible file formats?

You charge subscriptions and deprecate formats that can be handled by old software.

Lots of pros pay for subscription software and will for the rest of their careers. Amateurs use free software. Tomorrow's pros are, of course, today's teenagers.

Re: In Favor

[RockDoctor]

I thought those companies were dead.

I make 95% of my living with software from these two companies

As they used to say back when I had neither phone line nor Internet connection "On the Internet, no one knows that you're a dog - even a dead dog."

The Final Days of Autodesk

[UnixUnix]

"Is Autodesk on the right course?" "Is Autodesk acting like a leader of an industry, seeking to create new markets and broaden the use of its products?" Ah John Walker, you asked questions, but not about this. https://www.fourmilab.ch/autof...

What if...

[Anonymous Coward]

Forced subscription software sucks.
What if you could never buy a car.
What if you had to perpetually lease all the appliances in your home.
What if you couldn't own anything...

Re:What if...

[ctilsie242]

The worst thing is that if there is a financial downturn where one has to figure out to pay rent and get food on the table, you are hosed. At least you know that with software that is purchased, that it will work for a while, and if one loses their job for a while, it can be made to work, even if it has to reside in a virtual machine with a backlevel OS. However, with a subscription, that is not the case.

Re:What if...

[Oligonicella]

What if someone used hysterical, overboard examples as argument?

Re:What if...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Not being able to truly own a car is hardly a hysterical example. It's already the direction that parts of the industry are pushing in.

I think it sucks

[SWPadnos]

SolidWorks is close to that model now as well.
Sage accounting has a perpetual / offline license available, but you can't buy it from them - you have to go through a reseller.

It brings up a question I always ask: Who owns your data?

If you have to keep paying someone in order to access your designs, then you don't really own your data, they do.

Re:I think it sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

this is a similar concern when 'buying' media -- how much of the stuff at amazon that i buy do i really actually own a copy of? I assume none, which is why i typically buy only things that are cheap. Which means....basically none of their videos, very very little music [streaming, right?] and kindle books that are on sale. I have a lot of kindle books, i very rarely pay more than a couple of bucks each for them. thats a fair enough deal to me -- i am educated or entertained, but if they rip it out of my hands i didnt spend so much money on it that i will get uppity.

Re:I think it sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the PSA, you condescending twit.

Re:I think it sucks

[slinkp]

Amazon's a mixed bag. MP3 downloads that you purchase (not stream) are DRM-free.
Kindle content has DRM. Not sure about video purchases, but I believe they have DRM.

Re: I think it sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Donâ(TM)t want to breath *my* air? Build your own dome city.

Seriously though, at some point in time, consider supporting the free-as-in-freedom options. Theyâ(TM)re the only alternatives that seem to be viable on a 10 year horizon.

Re:I think it sucks

[ranton]

Thanks for the PSA, you condescending twit.

What exactly is he wrong about? Every application mentioned here allows you to export your data into non-proprietary formats if you want to use other software. The claim that you don't own your data in nonsense.

Re:I think it sucks

[ranton]

If you have to keep paying someone in order to access your designs, then you don't really own your data, they do.

You don't have to pay someone in order to access your designs. You only have to pay them when you want to access your designs through their software. All of these software applications offer export options which would allow you to stop using their software. You only have to keeping paying them as long as using their software is more cost effective than your alternatives.

Re: I think it sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Ironic being posted from someone (obviously) using an iPhone...

Re:I think it sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

You still have files, so you own the data. Better question would be, can you create your own software to read that data or is it patented/copyrighted? So there's even 0 possibility to have other software, that could display old data.

Re:I think it sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

It brings up a question I always ask: Who owns your data?

It also brings up another question: Why do people think they have to have all these updates? I'm amazed at how many people have just accepted the rental model because they feel they have no choice but to buy every version. I use Paint Shop Pro 5 and 16. Maybe Adobe CS can do something those programs can't do, but if it can, it's not something I need. I will not acccept rental software or any software that has to call home to work.

Re:I think it sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Never said he was wrong.

"Don't want to use SAGE? Or quickBooks? Or whatever? Buy a ledger book and do it manually.

Don't want to use Solidworks? Break out the drafting table, paper, and pencil.

Don't like software subscriptions? Start your own company, write software where you don't have that.

See? Easily solved."

Yes, a condescending twit.

Re:I think it sucks

[Bootsy Collins]

In terms of Photoshop, for example, there's plenty of free software/alternatives that you can use for viewing your data.

Perhaps not anymore. The OP seems to be suggesting that they're moving to a cloud storage paradigm where you no longer have local access to the files, in which case you can't easily (or perhaps, eventually, at all) pass them to GIMP or whatever else.

Re:I think it sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

I suppose you can use amazon to order DVDs.

Re:I think it sucks

[tepples]

All of these software applications offer export options which would allow you to stop using their software.

But are these exports 1. lossless (as opposed to printing to PDF, which destroys editability), and 2. in a publicly documented format?

Re:I think it sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty sure he was being ironic. The bit at the end where he says to start up a company as a solution and then followed up with "Easily solved" kind of gives it away.

Re:I think it sucks

[Oligonicella]

1) Pretty sure everything exports to bmp. 2) Pdf files can be edited with pdf editors and are open.

Re:I think it sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

At least SolidWorks still offers perpetual licenses as an option. No such luck with Inventor. I would be perfectly happy sticking with the same version of the software for 4-5 years if it meant I could use it offline (read: offshore) for any length of time.

Re:I think it sucks

[ewibble]

bmp is not loseless, in the sense that information is lost, not pixels, I maybe wrong, since I don't use these as often, but image editors store information like layers, shapes, text as text, etc. If you ever intend on editing these in the future a bitmap requires a lot more work. Try scaling a bitmap up/or even down it doesn't work well

Neither is PDF for the same reason.

Re:I think it sucks

[iampiti]

Yep. I think the only media that's usually DRM free is music. Most people switched to streaming rather than buying though.
Anyway, I refuse to buy DRM media, not only because my money would be supporting DRM but because I wouldn't know how long I'd be able to keep using that media. It's hard, but at least some of the books I want are being sold as drmless epub files.

Re:I think it sucks

[SWPadnos]

What exactly is he wrong about? Every application mentioned here allows you to export your data into non-proprietary formats if you want to use other software. The claim that you don't own your data in nonsense.

You're right, up to a point.

A Photoshop file is not just the pixels that end up in the final image though. It may contain multiple layers, alpha blends, titles or annotations, etc. It's more the equivalent of a source code file, and a jpeg or png is the binary output from that source document. This is more evident with video / motion editing software, as the "source" contains many forms of media and script-like descriptions for mixing and transitions.

Unless you can export a source file with full fidelity for all elements, and have similar editing capability to re-generate output (say, an HDR version of an image or a video with titles added), you still don't own your data, you are merely renting access to the source forms of it.

Re:I think it sucks

[dwywit]

Premiere Pro (perpetual or subscription) doesn't use a proprietary video format of its own - it's pretty much MPEG, so that's editable by lots of other software.

PPro will also export an EDL (editing decision list) - a file containing all the cuts, transitions, etc for use in another program. EDLs are supposed to be a universal import/export format for video editing.

Re:I think it sucks

[Cederic]

Well, a primary reason for upgrading Lightroom is support for newer camera models.

The new features seldom justified the cost but the software is good enough that being able to use it with the new toy was worth the expense.

That's likely to be the thing that triggers me into either ditching Lightroom or signing up to the subscription service. I'll make that decision based on the competition available when I buy a new camera.

Re:I think it sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

SolidWorks' rival PTC has moved to this model as well.

Hate the Sub Model

[jvp]

I'm not a fan of the sub model; I use several of the Adobe apps, so the $50/month seems like a steal when you consider the Suite used to cost in the thousands of dollars. But I'd still rather pay up once and be able to keep using the software as much as I wanted.

Re:Hate the Sub Model

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

If you could actually do arithmetic, Creative Cloud still didn't work out cost effective at the pricing in a lot of markets, and much less so if you didn't upgrade Creative Suite every time, which many users didn't.

We've run away from both Adobe and Autodesk as a direct result of these decisions. Most of our new graphics and UI work is done with tools like the Affinity suite. For occasional 3D modelling work we keep a pre-subscription licence around for compatibility but we're migrating to open tools like Blender for future-proofing. Only a brave person or fool lets their business depend on this sort of uncertain yet locked in arrangement for anything critical to their business, and whether they are a brave person or a fool is probably only a matter of perspective. There are good, realistic alternatives for most casual to moderately serious users these days.

Re:Hate the Sub Model

[OzPeter]

For my personal work I also dumped PhotoShop for Affinity Photo. I cold not justify the Adobe cost.

What is missing at the moment (IMHO) is a good Lightroom replacement.

Re:Hate the Sub Model

[deathguppie]

I'm not a pro photo guy, but I have used darktable and found it useful. Whether or not it is useful to you is obviously your call. I invested time into learning open source equivalents years ago knowing that software and licenses change to much for the average consumer to find proprietary software financially worthwhile.

Re:Hate the Sub Model

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not familiar with Affinity Suite, but thought I would take a look as I use Photoshop for everything.

God their website is awful. Tons of graphics, lots of lag, and too much scrolling around with very little information to be found.

Re:Hate the Sub Model

[cayenne8]

What is missing at the moment (IMHO) is a good Lightroom replacement.

So far, I"m finding On1 RAW to be a pretty good candidate for LR replacement. The cataloging part is a little weak, BUT, the RAW processing and such is great. I really like the simple and luminosity masking you can do with it within the RAW development area....really cool stuff.

Give it a look.

Re:Hate the Sub Model

[AvitarX]

The cost of creative suite in the US (design premium, we'll ignore the master collection which was much more) was about 1200 +600 every 18 months (working from memory, I think I'm a touch low).

It would take many years for the sub to cost more. People that were already on the upgrade cycle were ended up with a significant increase in cost after the 1 year 30/month intro (33->50/month).

It was a pretty deft move to basically have existing users make the cost of entry much much lower to keep themselves as the industry standard.

The low up front cost probably dramatically reduced piracy too.

The getting rid of individual app availability was kinda a jerk move though.

Re:Hate the Sub Model

[hispeedzintarwebz]

Darktable is fantastic. Adobe's model is why I switched to it. Autodesk did the same, which is why I'm learning Librecad and QCad for my (generally simple) furniture design. I switched to Linux completely (after dabbling for years) a year or so ago when it started to look like Windows was becoming a rental/portal for advertisement. It takes some work up front, but even with a slightly (and the gap is constantly narrowing) inferior application, knowing that I own the data and that it is free is worth it to me. Perhaps it would be different if I were a professional photographer or a CAD professional, but the subscription model is, I think, alarming either way.

Re:Hate the Sub Model

[Anonymous Coward]

For my personal work I also dumped PhotoShop for Affinity Photo. I cold not justify the Adobe cost.

I still use PhotoShop CS5 Extended that I bought in 2010. It was the third PhotoShop version that I've ever bought with my own money (previous ones being CS2 and CS4). CS6 didn't have enough improvements for me to justify buying it, and after that they went to the subscripton model and I noped out of that.

I'll keep using that version untl I can't get it working anymore. And that day I'll look at my possible options wery closely. Hopefully by that day the free alternatives have finally caught the state that PhotoShop was in 2010.

Re:Hate the Sub Model

[Jason1729]

When you say seems like a steal, do you actually work at Adobe's marketing department?

I use Photoshop and InDesign a lot. I bought the "Design Standard" version of CS6 which came with those as well as Illustrator and Acrobat. Full price on that suite was $900 CDN and I paid under $500 as an upgrade. I do use Illustrator enough to not want to give it up, so I'm looking at $50/month forever for a. $900 software package that I could use forever. Hardly a 'steal".

Add to that that for the relatively few people who actually used to buy the Master suite, it was under $3000 up front and about $1000 per upgrade. There was no reason to buy every upgrade so even that went from little cheaper in the medium term to a lot cheaper in the long term.

Adobe didn't do this to give anyone a "steal" compared to the old model. It is a blatant ripoff no matter what your usage was and only looks to Adobe's bottom line.

Their software has also been pretty stagnant ever since, they used to have some nice new features every couple of years. Now why would they waste money on R&D when they get the same income no matter what?
For me, I'll be keeping CS6 as long as I can run it and then I still won't pay a subscription.

Re:Hate the Sub Model

[Anonymous Coward]

Darktable is from a linux zealot that would rather cut his left arm off than support windows.

https://www.darktable.org/2011...

Also, it doesn't have support for collections, which makes it useless as a cataloging system.

Re:Hate the Sub Model

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh and here is the retraction: https://www.darktable.org/2017...

Except I don't trust this asshat as far as I can throw him.

Re:Hate the Sub Model

[torkus]

Last I checked, you can still buy lightroom outright. It's one of the few adobe licenses you can ... and I've no idea why.

Not that I'm complaining. $150 to buy or $100 for a cloud license (with a pitiful amount of storage). Yeah, i'll just buy it. Sadly they *just* announced they are no longer providing updates to the fixed licenses (Dec 2017). But if your camera is already supported then who cares?

Re:Hate the Sub Model

[ranton]

Only a brave person or fool lets their business depend on this sort of uncertain yet locked in arrangement for anything critical to their business

I missed what was uncertain or locked in about this arrangement. Or at least any more than plenty of other business risks companies need to manage. Finance departments often prefer subscription services because the costs are more certain than periodic upgrade requests from staff. And any business who has ever signed a lease for an office understands being locked into certain expenses is a standard part of business.

I'm not a fan of companies only offering subscription models, but lets not blow this out of proportion. Nearly all enterprise quality software require a huge buy in from companies and are not easy to migrate away from. The cost of migrating from one piece of software from another is often quite high and the actual software licensing is generally a very small line item in the total expense.

Re:Hate the Sub Model

[swillden]

I'm not a pro photo guy, but I have used darktable and found it useful. Whether or not it is useful to you is obviously your call. I invested time into learning open source equivalents years ago knowing that software and licenses change to much for the average consumer to find proprietary software financially worthwhile.

Another commercial option is Aftershot Pro. I started using it primarily because it's cross-platform (including Linux), before Darktable was available, and I've never regretted the money I spent on it.

Re:Hate the Sub Model

[tcc3]

I really wanted to like darktable, especially after Adobe started the subscription model. But darktables refusal to incorporate the file management/sorting/database features really is a black mark. The developing portion is fantastic, but the organizing is half the benefit of Lightroom.

Re:Hate the Sub Model

[jvp]

If you only use 1 or 2 apps, I agree the sub model isn't ideal. And note, I'm not defending it, either. But when you start dipping into 4 or 5 (or more) of the Suite applications, it becomes an interesting cost model. I still don't like it, and I would jump at the chance for an outright purchase. But the sub model let me start playing around with AE, and gave me access to AU, which complimented my use of PR. Along with those three, I also regularly use PS and LR.

Re:Hate the Sub Model

[thegarbz]

when you consider the Suite used to cost in the thousands of dollars

And people who used the Suite may be happy about it. People who used a single program, no so much.

Re:Hate the Sub Model

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

The current cost of Creative Cloud all-apps in the UK for around two years seems to be about the same, allowing for inflation, as what Design Premium used to cost for a permanent licence.

We have copies of Creative Suite that we bought many years ago, still use from time to time, and have never needed to upgrade. Cloud would already be probably 3x as expensive for our situation, and obviously we'd be locked in and lose the use of it if we ever stopped paying.

I'm still waiting for anyone to highlight a killer feature that would make it worth upgrading from our old CS to current CC versions. Maybe for some people they're out there, but for our needs CS was OK and other applications tend to do a better job with the pain points anyway these days. YMMV.

Re:Hate the Sub Model

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I missed what was uncertain or locked in about this arrangement.

They could remove an essential feature you rely on, or discontinue a whole application, any time they want.

They could increase your subscription fees to arbitrary levels, any time they want.

I haven't read their current terms, but I'd be surprised if they don't set out some situations where they have a right to discontinue service to your business entirely.

If your lease is running out and won't be renewed, you can always move to new premises. It's a hassle, but it's a well understood process and won't kill your business. And typically you will have several months of notice to plan the move and make transition arrangements. If you're relying on online subscription software for a key part of your business and you get in one morning to find Adobe turned something off, what are you going to do?

Nearly all enterprise quality software require a huge buy in from companies and are not easy to migrate away from.

That's true, but if you have permanently licensed, locally installed software for your essential tasks, you always have the option of just keeping what you had and not migrating at all. If you're relying on a subscription-locked or any sort of cloud-hosted software, you don't have that backup plan.

Re:Hate the Sub Model

[magarity]

I use several of the Adobe apps, so the $50/month seems like a steal

Alas, if only it was per month. But that's just the payment schedule. It's really an annual subscription complete with punitive early termination fees. Sign up and you're committed to $50 * 12.

Re:Hate the Sub Model

[dgatwood]

Not anymore. LR6 was the last perpetual license. They've announced that going forward, it's subscription-only. All the semi-pro photographers are having kittens.

Re:Hate the Sub Model

[dgatwood]

The problem with subscription-only software is the endgame. If you've never lost work because the software manufacturer went out of business or dropped a product, you haven't been using computers very long.

Eventually, Photoshop will become EOLed, because all software eventually is (and the subscription model suggests that perhaps they aren't bringing in enough money to keep the lights on, so that might happen sooner rather than later). When that happens, those of us who bought Photoshop CS6 will still be able to limp along and access our files by running it in a VM... essentially forever. Those folks who rent it by the month will basically lose everything, or at best will have to write new tools to nondestructively convert their files into somebody else's file format.

Rental models are for people who don't know any better and for agencies whose clients require them to deliver content in a specific format. Everyone else I know is fleeing Adobe for other companies as quickly as we can, and eventually that momentum will result in fewer and fewer of those agencies paying for subscriptions, until their revenue stream eventually dries up completely. It will take a few years, but it is pretty much inevitable. And when it does, the people who continued using Photoshop after CS6 won't get any sympathy from me, because, as they say, I told you so.

SaaS Haiku

[Moblaster]

If a had a nose,
Iâ(TM)d gladly pay through it, twice.
But my nose expired.

Quaint

[Anonymous Coward]

You want to photoshop? Go to your cubicle where your corp has a licensed version for you and make whatever crap they tell you to.

Independent creatvie type? You better be real rich.

Re:Quaint

[AvitarX]

Because you better be rich to pay $20/month?

That's pretty low even for a hobbiest.

$240/year is less than a photographer used to pay for film.

Re:Quaint

[Lab Rat Jason]

No, that's extremely expensive for a hobbyist. It might be ok for someone who is making a little folding money as a "side gig," but for someone who derives no monetary value from the work they do in the system, and possibly (like me) only uses it a few times a year or less, that's a terribly large cost.

Re:Quaint

[AvitarX]

If you're only using it a couple times a year that's significant, I agree.

Probably better off creating a throw away email and just using it for free if you're that infrequent of a user (I suspect their very generous and easy to game free trials aren't an accident, and are specifically to cover the few times a year use).

I'm surprised you don't know any hobbiests that $20/month is a drop in the bucket for their hobby, photographers specifically even.

Re:Quaint

[scsirob]

If you only use it a few times a year, would you be willing to pay an hourly rate? Like $0.50 per hour of use?

Re:Quaint

[Lab Rat Jason]

Yes, definitely. However, the rub is the amount of feature shift that occurs between uses makes a subscription like this annoying too, since I'll spend plenty of time trying to learn the new features, just to accomplish a project that probably will require less than 15-20 hours using the tool. But still yes. I'd pay rates like that.

View?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gun, meet foot. Foot, gun.

All these companies should take a look at Quark, or what happened to the old super proprietary UNIX-world.

I can see why

[Anonymous Coward]

I personally don't like it but it's one of the more surefire ways of reducing piracy whilst kicking your actual customers in the wallet to make up for any perceived piracy losses.

Re:I can see why

[Anonymous Coward]

it's not even that. If you look at how a good chunk of users upgrade software versions every 3-4 years. The cost of the subscrption for that time is about the same as buying the license outright for those versions.

The Adobe suite was what, $2400 or something before they started subscriptions?

Re:I can see why

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't just about pricing, but the fact that you no longer have control over your own data.

But by all means, keep sucking that corporate cock.

Re:I can see why

[nctritech]

Adobe at some point past CS6 changed their Premiere files from plain text XML to a binary format. What a coincidence, that's when they moved to a subscription model too...

Re:I can see why

[EnsilZah]

Check out the torrent sites, you can still get Adobe and Autodesk software with these countermeasures disabled, sometimes even before they come out officially for paying customers.

This has nothing to do with piracy, it's just a way to ensure a steady flow of monthly earnings.

Re:I can see why

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me tell you that it didn't reduce piracy. If anything, it gave a new boost to piracy because there are people who would buy the software but refuse to rent it.

Re:I can see why

[AvitarX]

The most popular version we're 1200-1800 or so, with upgrades around 600 every 18 months.

Re:I can see why

[Anonymous Coward]

Go get laid, you grump.

Re:I can see why

[ranton]

It isn't just about pricing, but the fact that you no longer have control over your own data.

But by all means, keep sucking that corporate cock.

What software mentioned in the article or even these comments doesn't offer export options? Everything I have seen mentioned have methods for you to get all of your data before you cancel your subscription, so you certainly have control over your own data.

Re:I can see why

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh I get laid every chance I get. In fact I have a wife and two children with a third child on the way. My wife and I earn over $200k combined yearly, by using professional software. Whereas you fucktarded shitdot sheeple still live in your mommy's basement, unable to get laid due to being such autistitards always having temper tantrums, or as you autistic faggots call "meltdowns." You and others like you depend on communism just to stay alive whereas others like me work smart and hard to get ahead. Communist open-sores is the same, fucking way, worthless to anyone other than the commnunists/socialists. You think that just because it exists people should be flocking to use it despite the fucking fact the "features" you faggots always add are not in tune with what real users want. Adobe, Microsoft, et-al do just that, and that is why they are the industry leaders and none from the communist open-sores community can even come close to that.

Re:I can see why

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it makes it easier. For 50$ you now have a copy of all the software, on which you can start developing a crack if you want to. Before this cost a few thousand $ or you had to 'borrow' it from someone. A quick Google search shows that the software described here seems to be readily available as a cracked download. It may reduce piracy in that it makes the program less desirable to legitimate users, which will probably also reduce the demand from pirates.

Re:I can see why

[Anonymous Coward]

My wife and I earn over $200k combined yearly...

Judging by both your posts, I doubt you are even employed.

Libertopia

[Anonymous Coward]

You own nothing, rent everything, forever.

It's why I'm dumping Quicken

[Anonymous Coward]

As soon as they announced the newest release (2018) was subscription based, I went looking for alternatives (OSS and perpetual license). Already thought the last version was slow and full of feature bloat, but the move to require annual payment for said pleasure was the last straw.

Re:It's why I'm dumping Quicken

[SirDrinksAlot]

The Quicken change is garbage, once you upgrade to 2018 all of your data gets held hostage going forward. If you don't renew for the low low price of full price next year you only have read-access. Before at least they just disabled downloading financial statements which sure that's no problem. It just made the old versions a pain but I understand that limitation, importing external data could require ongoing support.

If a user doesn't need to download statements or new features, forced upgrades are no benefit so long as everything is working fine.

I setup a new PC for the gf's family that I got for them, I had to dig up a copy of Quicken 2015 to reinstall since they're poor farmers. Their old PC was a Pentium 4 with Windows XP running Quicken 2011.... They were happy with 2011 and don't need anything new or fancy, unfortunately they lost the CD and it probably wouldn't work on Windows 10 anyways. Forcing them to pay $35-50/yr to be able to manage not going into debt is counter-intuitive. This sounds like it's thick with exaggeration but unfortunately this is the case. People trying to make ends meet responsibly trying to be forced to shell out more out of what they have, Quicken isn't used just by rich people with money burning holes in their pockets.

Re:It's why I'm dumping Quicken

[Anonymous Coward]

(Posting AC to preserve moderation)
When Intuit stopped updating Quicken for Mac years ago I switched to Banktivity and never looked back, even after new Mac versions resumed by popular demand. This new decision will bring a lot more people over to Banktivity.

It does everything that Quicken does, and comes with an iOS app that you can use to log transactions in the field as they occur. It iCloud-syncs with its parent on your desktop. No more coming back from a trip and having to decipher a a sweaty mess of receipts as you type them into Quicken.

Re:It's why I'm dumping Quicken

[bromoseltzer]

Not so much. The Quicken upgrade did not require me to store my data on their server. The data still resides on my hard drive. (They even gave me a good size introductory Dropbox account for backups.) You do have to have a Quicken account on their server in order to get your software updates and to manage the billing. I had been in the habit of upgrading every other year. Now, it's continuous upgrades for an annual cost that's comparable for me, and there's a no worries update experience.

There are questions, like how long could I operate if the network goes down and how portable is the data? Quicken's data format has always been proprietary AFAIK, but there are export options.

Re:It's why I'm dumping Quicken

[Anonymous Coward]

I dumped Quicken when it started double-applying my financial statements from the bank. I changed to GnuCash and I love it. I find even though I have to reconcile it myself, it helps me keep better track of what is going on in my bank account. It has the ability to download the bank data, but entering everything manually is good for me. I usually hit my bank's website every couple of weeks to get any ATM transactions my spouse forgot to enter.

Re:It's why I'm dumping Quicken

[sgage]

"They were happy with 2011 and don't need anything new or fancy, unfortunately they lost the CD and it probably wouldn't work on Windows 10 anyways."

I don't know about 2011, but I use Quicken 99 (yes, 1999) on Windows 10 every day without any problems.

Re:It's why I'm dumping Quicken

[habig]

As soon as they announced the newest release (2018) was subscription based, I went looking for alternatives (OSS and perpetual license).

So, what did you find out? I'm in the same boat, but haven't gone and done my homework yet. Someone below suggested Banktivity, but I'm not a Mac user.

I had been hoping that since Quicken got spun off from Intuit that the software would get better (getting worse woujld be difficult at this point), but I'm completely not interested in a subscription data hostage situation to find out.

Re:It's why I'm dumping Quicken

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the idea is that you use the subscription based Quicken to manage all your damn software and media subscriptions.

Re:It's why I'm dumping Quicken

[Anonymous Coward]

So what is a good replacement for Quicken? I'm not a fan of storing my data on the web of course; I'd like something that is contained to my PC.

Re:It's why I'm dumping Quicken

[Cro Magnon]

I actually dumped Quicken a few years ago due to numerous minor but annoying glitches. I'm currently using plain old spreadsheets to track my money. Might be clunky and limited compared to Quicken, gnucash, or any of the other finance programs, but they're completely under my control, no unexpected surprises, and if Microsoft screws me, I can easily switch to Libre or Google.

Re:It's why I'm dumping Quicken

[Torodung]

The only problem I have with the Quicken subscription is they are charging the full boxed software price, that used to get you three years of download functionality, for every year of the subscription. That's a threefold price increase! I hope they reap what they sow and adjust the price to what a yearly subscription should cost.

Re:It's why I'm dumping Quicken

[Torodung]

It seems to me that your annual cost, considering you bought every two years, is doubled. How is that comparable?

Re:It's why I'm dumping Quicken

[chrisaj5]

I jettisoned Quicken and TurboTax several years ago after they started forcing upgrades to keep up with my investments. I moved to MoneyDance (no affiliation), and it doesn't do everything as well, but it's faster and more than sufficient for my needs. It's not OSS, but you never have to upgrade (yet!).

Re:It's why I'm dumping Quicken

[bromoseltzer]

Right. The annual price may be lower than it would have been under the old system, but not by half. As a returning customer, you may get a discount for the first year. Then you're hooked. :(

Re:It's why I'm dumping Quicken

[ewhac]

As soon as they announced the newest release (2018) was subscription based, I went looking for alternatives (OSS and perpetual license).

GnuCash. Terrible name. Decent program.

To answer the question from the summary

[Anonymous Coward]

It would mean the year of the linux desktop is here. Finally. At long last.

Re:To answer the question from the summary

[Anonymous Coward]

Until Linux goes subscription only, which I expect to happen around 2019.

Re:To answer the question from the summary

[OneHundredAndTen]

It would mean the year of the linux desktop is here. Finally. At long last.

What for? What is it that you can't do in your Linux desktop that you could, if the year of Linux in the desktop were here? Other than offering a more enticing target for malware and crooks, that is. My hope is that the year or Linux in the desktop will never arrive. Fortunately, the solid work of the Gnome and KDE people is promising in that respect.

We Need to Stand Up For What WE Want!

[Flashband]

I found replacements of Photoshop and Illustrator for $50 each, both are much better (Affinity Photo, and Designer). As for any other software that changes to a subscription based pricing, I just move along to something else. I think these companies have forgotten that we the consumers decide what we want or need, and can just buy from somewhere else. Standards are set and broken everyday, and we the consumer need to make them change to our needs.

Re:We Need to Stand Up For What WE Want!

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you provide a link to "Designer", that is such a generic name, googling doesn't work, at least not on the first 5 pages.

Re:We Need to Stand Up For What WE Want!

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

The Affinity range includes Photo and Designer, with Publisher due later this year.

Affinity web site

Re:We Need to Stand Up For What WE Want!

[Anonymous Coward]

Had a look at Affinity: their web site must be cloned from "websitesthatsuck.com", and they don't do Linux. I guess I will have to keep using LibreCAD - its not very good, but there is no way I would use AutoCAD - not even a pirate copy.

Re:We Need to Stand Up For What WE Want!

[Anonymous Coward]

lol - used both of the "replacements" you say that are "much better".

Better in price is about it.

Cheap alternatives if you don't use the adobe tool functionality is about what they are.

Re:We Need to Stand Up For What WE Want!

[EnsilZah]

This may work if you use the software for a hobby, maybe even in some cases as a freelancer if you end up delivering a flat file, but as someone who works at a studio, our internal pipeline is set up to work with these formats, they might need to import these files into other software that doesn't support Affinity Photo or Gimp editable files.
We have files that we exchange with our client or subcontractor and they're going to require a certain format and expect that it looks exactly the same on the other end as it does here.

So the studio is going to pay the monthly fee, and anyone who works with it will also need to have the software, as long as there is no widely accepted open source alternative.

Re:We Need to Stand Up For What WE Want!

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

The home page is pretty bad, but just go to the menu top-right and look at the real product pages. Those are fine. In any case, if you're choosing your creative software based on someone's home page, you're doing it wrong.

Re:We Need to Stand Up For What WE Want!

[geekmux]

I found replacements of Photoshop and Illustrator for $50 each, both are much better (Affinity Photo, and Designer). As for any other software that changes to a subscription based pricing, I just move along to something else. I think these companies have forgotten that we the consumers decide what we want or need, and can just buy from somewhere else. Standards are set and broken everyday, and we the consumer need to make them change to our needs.

I think you've forgotten that most consumers simply don't give a shit. They're lazy, and they'll take whatever manufacturers demand.

You can try and "stand up" for your rights. You can try and claim that you can make a difference. But at the end of the day, your "army" attempting to change an industry that was established on inaction and indifference won't change a damn thing because you'll represent 5% of the consumer voice at best.

Companies have not "forgotten". They know damn well I'm right, which is why they're so arrogant about displaying "courage".

Re:We Need to Stand Up For What WE Want!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ugh, LibreCAD... I'm sorry. I have fully legal versions of AutoCAD 13 and 2000, They cost an arm and a leg, and getting 2000 to work on Windows 7 was a pain in the ass. I still use v13 to do contract work today. I'll be damned if I buy into their shitty prescription model. OTOH, if I have a client that demands a particular version of data file, I make damn sure they're paying for the sub as a line item. In a way, the sub model makes contract work easier, but casuals get the shaft in the long run.

Re:We Need to Stand Up For What WE Want!

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

People say this a lot, but the UI for Adobe's Creative Suite/Cloud apps has always been clumsy and inconsistent and they've always been buggy. That doesn't seem to have improved much despite all the new versions or rolling updates since the move to Cloud. There are some areas where some of the newer applications are better than Adobe, and in some cases have been since day 1, regardless of cost.

Re:We Need to Stand Up For What WE Want!

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

That cuts both ways, though. I know a studio who use Autodesk products for 3D things. They were "forced" to go to subscriptions as you describe, but it turned out that some of their customers weren't playing that game and stayed on their older versions. It also turned out that Autodesk only let the studio use the last three years' versions on their subscription model, so by four years, the studio was having significant problems supplying data to some of their long-standing customers using established, signed-off formats and pipelines, which was just bad for everyone involved. Someone forgot the old saying about if it ain't broke...

Re:We Need to Stand Up For What WE Want!

[cayenne8]

but as someone who works at a studio, our internal pipeline is set up to work with these formats, they might need to import these files into other software that doesn't support Affinity Photo

Affinity Photo works just fine importing and exporting Adobe PS files (PSD, TIFF, etc).

Re:We Need to Stand Up For What WE Want!

[hispeedzintarwebz]

Check out FreeCAD and QCAD. They are also free, but might be better for you. (I'm not a CAD expert, but I'm trying to compare them for simple furniture design - oddly enough Librecad so far is on top for my needs, but development doesn't seem to be as active as on the other two.)

Re:We Need to Stand Up For What WE Want!

[AvitarX]

The file exchange is exactly why I love the subscription model.

Everybody is up to date and on the same version.

Re:We Need to Stand Up For What WE Want!

[messymerry]

Number one: I detest the word "consumer". We are customers just like the .gov and .biz bulletheads. Number two: The retail customers are a drop in the bucket. The real money is in servicing the aforementioned bulletheads who buy their licenses with our money... 'just sayin,,,

Re:We Need to Stand Up For What WE Want!

[EnsilZah]

I just tried it and it does a pretty decent job with PSDs, but it doesn't have all of Photoshop's features so it has to resort to using rasterized versions of those particular layers.

For example, I use smart objects pretty extensively in my work and the import just flattens them to a pixel layer.

Re:We Need to Stand Up For What WE Want!

[kelemvor4]

The home page is pretty bad, but just go to the menu top-right and look at the real product pages. Those are fine. In any case, if you're choosing your creative software based on someone's home page, you're doing it wrong.

The site really is awful. One can only assume that affinity is a tiny company and couldn't afford to hire a web developer. It doesn't inspire confidence when looking at their software offerings.. on the other hand, it's only 50 bucks...

Re:We Need to Stand Up For What WE Want!

[kelemvor4]

People say this a lot, but the UI for Adobe's Creative Suite/Cloud apps has always been clumsy and inconsistent and they've always been buggy. That doesn't seem to have improved much despite all the new versions or rolling updates since the move to Cloud. There are some areas where some of the newer applications are better than Adobe, and in some cases have been since day 1, regardless of cost.

That's true. Adobe software is far from intuitive and user friendly. It requires many hours of formal instruction to use effectively. I've often speculated that they do it on purpose to help customers maintain market share by making it difficult for the untrained to produce good results with.

Re:We Need to Stand Up For What WE Want!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you've forgotten that most consumers simply don't give a shit.

They'll give a shit when all their software is subscription and they're paying $200 per month which they can no longer afford.

Larger companies will eat the subscription model.

Small businesses and home users will eventually fall away - do without or find non subscription alternatives.

Re:We Need to Stand Up For What WE Want!

[geekmux]

I think you've forgotten that most consumers simply don't give a shit.

They'll give a shit when all their software is subscription and they're paying $200 per month which they can no longer afford.

Which is exactly why subscription models are nowhere near that cost. It's called Death by 1,000 Cuts. SaaS at $9.99/month is as justified as a bar turning on the happy hour sign. Works every damn time.

Oh, and consumers will ultimately be paying $200/month for all of their services, but they'll justify that cost because they're paying two dozen providers for several services that used to be one-time costs.

Larger companies will eat the subscription model.

Small businesses and home users will eventually fall away - do without or find non subscription alternatives.

Small providers will eventually get consumed by the Mega-Corp Overlords. Competition doesn't stand a chance in the future, no matter how cheap your product may be.

Re:We Need to Stand Up For What WE Want!

[jbengt]

. . . I'm sorry. I have fully legal versions of AutoCAD 13 and 2000 . . .

You hung on to your AutoCAD 13? The worst AutoCAD version ever?

So what else is available

[Anonymous Coward]

I would love to switch from autocad based piping software to something else, but I dont know of any. It would need to have a similar feature set and as far as I can tell it just doesn't exist.

Re:So what else is available

[pr0fessor]

I have a sister and a brother in-law that are engineers they talk about Creo all the time but it's far from free.

Mostly immaterial what people think...

[Junta]

Adobe has a stranglehold on that market, and they can pretty much do whatever they want. They realized that people weren't bothering to buy new versions, and as such their revenue was threatened, so they changed course to a subscription, to guarantee future revenue, unless a competitor came in. No competitors in sight and given the state of software today, it is highly unlikely that another vendor would choose a non-subscription path. I get everything I want out of GIMP personally, so I'm not too personally invested in that per se, but it does serve as an inspiration to all sorts of software vendors as a 'I can't make customers pay for new function, and I can't branch into new markets competently, so I can make them rent the same old software to get revenue and as a bonus, I don't have to work as hard to innovate'.

Re:Mostly immaterial what people think...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

The strongest competition for Adobe probably isn't from FOSS like the GIMP and Inkscape these days, but rather from the smaller but commercial outfits making products like Sketch and the Affinity suite. Several companies have already sprung up with products to fill (parts of) the gap left by CS when they went subscription-only, and they seem to be doing pretty well so far.

Re:Mostly immaterial what people think...

[Gr8Apes]

You've got a whole range of products to choose from and they support various OSes better than Adobe's offerings: Capture One, Affinity, On 1, Pixelmator, Snapheal, FX PhotoStudio are just a few that I've been playing about with to replace various portions of the workflow. I'll figure out which ones I'll settle on one day.

Re:Mostly immaterial what people think...

[Godai]

I'm a third-party Illustrator developer and I can say that the move to a subscription model is a bit of a pain for us. We have a lot of users who won't budge from CS6 as a result. This really ties a support anchor around our neck.

That said, knowing a number of people at Adobe I can safely tell you that this wasn't purely a "let's lock people" decision. I'm sure they're happy with that as a by-product, but a big part of the of the reason they went this way was their biggest customers requested it.

You might ask: requested it? Sure. If you're a big company and you have, say, 100 seats of Illustrator, but you only upgrade every two years, you have a major problem. You need $100k to do your upgrade, but you only use it on alternating years. If you don't spend that $100k in one year, your accounting department won't give it to you the year after. Corporate account is *really* stupid that way. Apparently they got a lot of feedback from their corporate users that a subscription model would be ideal: they wouldn't have to worry about big jumps in upgrades (every other version) and it would smooth out their expenses.

Now, could you have worked out some way to let them do that while also letting someone own it? Maybe, but once you build the subscription model code, I imagine they decided supporting both methods was stupid. And again, as others have pointed out, they priced the subscription so if you were a regular upgrader, you're saving money. If you weren't, it will be pricier, but why should Adobe bend over backwards to make that person's life easier? If you skipped every other upgrade, it's a wash in terms of cost.

Re:Mostly immaterial what people think...

[Anonymous Coward]

Adobe has a stranglehold on that market, and they can pretty much do whatever they want. They realized that people weren't bothering to buy new versions, and as such their revenue was threatened, so they changed course to a subscription, to guarantee future revenue, unless a competitor came in.

There is a very good chance those users that don't upgrade due to pricing will simply move on to free options. Like most corporate decisions nowadays, this seems very shortsighted. Time will tell.

Re:Mostly immaterial what people think...

[Anonymous Coward]

"To guarantee future revenue". So nobody has been born since 2015, or whenever you could last buy, outright, Adobe software, rather than subscribe to it? Every year tens of millions of people are born, (or is it even more?), there are plenty of new customers every year for software companies. And Adobe didn't have to charge such a ridiculous price for their software in the first place, they could have sold ten times as many copies if they made their prices more affordable.

Re:Mostly immaterial what people think...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a PR justification to push away the hatred, though it is stupid enough to be plausible. The thing is, selling the subscription doesn't preclude them from selling a fully licensed version.

Re:Mostly immaterial what people think...

[Anonymous Coward]

big part of the of the reason they went this way was their biggest customers requested it.

Requested it as in "please move completely to a subscription-based model for everyone and screw those who want to buy an actual physical copy" ?

I imagine they decided supporting both methods was stupid. And again, as others have pointed out, they priced the subscription so if you were a regular upgrader, you're saving money. If you weren't, it will be pricier, but why should Adobe bend over backwards to make that person's life easier?

Why would they make that person's life easier? So they can keep them as a customer, I'd imagine.

Re:Mostly immaterial what people think...

[Anonymous Coward]

A good substitute for Photoshop is the excellent Photoline - It is also binary plugin compatible with Photoshop plugins. Best part, it's inexpensive, and supports running in Linux under Wine very well. I use it on Large Format camera scans that make other tools slow down to a crawl.

Re:Mostly immaterial what people think...

[kelemvor4]

You might ask: requested it? Sure. If you're a big company and you have, say, 100 seats of Illustrator, but you only upgrade every two years, you have a major problem. You need $100k to do your upgrade, but you only use it on alternating years. If you don't spend that $100k in one year, your accounting department won't give it to you the year after. Corporate account is *really* stupid that way. Apparently they got a lot of feedback from their corporate users that a subscription model would be ideal: they wouldn't have to worry about big jumps in upgrades (every other version) and it would smooth out their expenses.

Seems unusual. At my employer, we simply negotiate ELA's for large purchases - although $100k would not be significant enough to qualify as a capital purchase, it would simply be an item on some departments annual expense budget. To that end, yes departments generally have to use or lose their expense budgets. If you can't work out how to manage that for your organization, this is going to be the least of your problems.
Keep in mind too that large companies are not going to be maintaining direct connections to the internet. Poking holes in a firewall to allow subscription based software to work is going to be objectionable to security and network teams at a minimum. Such things also carry costs in both of those realms... where large firms are concerned.

When Adobe made this change, we switched to other products where possible (Acrobat for example) and have a stringent exception process for the few employees whose job truly necessitates this brand of software specifically. Adobe is making less money from us than they used to. I guess the additional revenue from home users must be making up for it because they don't show signs of backing down yet.

Re:Mostly immaterial what people think...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the whole Capex vs Opex BS that market speculants have been pushing on public companies for years. There is 0 reason to continue allowing companies to be public. They should be private or coop with the owner/s being solidary and individually responsible and liable for all actions of the company.

Re:Mostly immaterial what people think...

[Schnapple]

...until they stop doing pretty well, at which point they'll likely change to subscription pricing. After hiking up the prices for the perpetual licenses to no avail. aka the Paint Shop Pro path.

Re:Mostly immaterial what people think...

[StormReaver]

..but rather from the smaller but commercial outfits making products like Sketch and the Affinity suite.

And then what happens when those proprietary companies make the same decision as the current crop or proprietary companies? Changing masters does nothing to solve the slavery problem.

Re:Mostly immaterial what people think...

[dgatwood]

That said, knowing a number of people at Adobe I can safely tell you that this wasn't purely a "let's lock people" decision. I'm sure they're happy with that as a by-product, but a big part of the of the reason they went this way was their biggest customers requested it.

That's called "lying with the truth". Their biggest customers requested that subscriptions be an OPTION, because for companies that upgrade the entire suite every year, that model is cheaper, and they have no need to access content more than a few months old anyway, so if Adobe went out of business tomorrow, it wouldn't be a huge pain point. So for them, it is a win.

However, I guarantee that NONE of their biggest customers requested that the product be EXCLUSIVELY available with subscriptions for everyone else. If anybody believes otherwise, I have a bridge I'll sell him/her.

Re:Mostly immaterial what people think...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

The thing is, there is relatively little we don't understand about how to build this kind of software. I mean, sure, there are some clever image processing algorithms behind some of the new features, but the fundamentals are what they are. It's within the capabilities of a relatively small team to implement those basics well, and that is exactly what several of these newer competitors seem to be doing. There is no reason you need to be the scale of Adobe to make a profitable drawing package, and no reason you need to incur those kinds of overheads. So while it's certainly possible that some of these new packages won't keep making money forever, Adobe's vacation of the non-subscription market leaves a huge gap and I don't see any likelihood of business drying up any time soon.

Re:Mostly immaterial what people think...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Erm... If you don't like the new approach you keep the one you already have? Just like a lot of people have done with old CS versions?

Besides, I don't see it as inevitable that they will make that decision. You can make a lot of money selling new versions of this kind of software; you just have to have some worthwhile improvements each time.

Re:Mostly immaterial what people think...

[Anonymous Coward]

"They realized that people weren't bothering to buy new versions"

So now they are guaranteeing that no-one will want the new versions.

Re:Mostly immaterial what people think...

[Anonymous Coward]

IMHO anyone wanting to have an offering similar to Lightroom will need to have a converter to translate catalog data and, in particular, edits to the new software. Understandably this would be on a close enough is good enough basis.

Competition?

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe in free markets, and companies should be able to pursue a subscription model if that's how they feel they can maximize revenue. That being said, it sounds like said publishers are lacking competition. Perhaps it's a good time for a competitor to enter the space and better address the customer's needs.

Of course, there are also less savory options, like cracked software, but that's not a supportable model for many reasons.

Re:Competition?

[Junta]

Problem is that if you are doing commercial software as a newcomer, you'll *also* want to go subscription. Subscription is more viable and it means that you have increased likelihood of future revenue even if you sit on your ass and do nothing.

It's consumer-hostile, but those that engage in it are going to out-resource those that do the right thing by the customer in the long run. In some circles, the community doing open source can overturn it, but I wouldn't expect professional competition to provide the answer.

Re:Competition?

[SirGarlon]

I don't think the subscription model has to be consumer-hostile. It's keeping the storage formats as trade secrets that's the problem. If you respect the consumer's right to migrate their data, for example by providing a gratis migration tool or, better yet, making your file format open to begin with, I don't see the problem.

Why would someone keep paying for your software if you weren't holding their data hostage? The same reasons they chose to adopt it in the first place! Functionality, usability, performance, productivity. If you keep delivering benefits, I guarantee you will keep receiving revenue. (You may not grow revenue as much as your money-grubbing hedge fund shareholders demand, but if you're willing to screw your customers to hit a quarterly growth target, you deserve what happens when they wise up.)

In other words, secret data formats are not a consumer benefit and consumers don't want them. That's the consumer-hostile part of the business model: not the subscription per se.

Re:Competition?

[easyTree]

Perhaps it's a good time for a competitor to enter the space and better address the customer's needs

One can only applaud Adobe, as once they've come to the same conclusion, they wasted no time in opening a door to competitors. Most altruistic!

Re:Competition?

[Anonymous Coward]

So I think what you are saying is that the niche of people that want perpetual licensed software isn't large enough to really make a dent in the revenue of companies choosing to go subscription. If it was a large enough market, someone would come forward to fill it. Maybe it is just a few thousand whiners? I don't know. But if enough people wanted it, someone would sell it.

Quark Who?

[pr0t0]

The rented software model is why I'm still using Creative Suite CS3. I'll bite the bullet eventually, and maybe this has worked out just fine for Adobe, but it kept me from doing any upgrades so there's at a couple of lost sales. Adobe's position is pretty locked right now with so much infrastructure and workflow built around their products, but had anyone made a serious move into the space, I think they would have been given a hard look as a replacement.

So that's my take. It's easy to build a business using rented tools, but it's tough to sustain one because you are at the mercy of the company who owns the tools. I will always look for alternatives first. It's usually companies who have the hubris to believe that their products are irreplaceable that take a fall. While they seemed to have managed the transition, Adobe should still be mindful of the fall of QuarkXPress.

Re:Quark Who?

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree. If you're still using the CS3 suite....you didn't get the upgrade for CS4 (which was pre-subscription) when it came out.....so you were waiting anyways.

CS6 was subscription (I don't remember if they had a standalone - but, if so, you chose to skip it too). As such, you're one of the few that don't upgrade every few years anyways, so you fail to see that the subscription cost is the same as what you would have paid for the standalone license after that 3ish year period anyways.

Re:Quark Who?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

maybe this has worked out just fine for Adobe

It would be fascinating to know whether it really is working now that competition is starting to appear and the ongoing costs are starting to bite. However, if you look at Adobe's official statements, it's remarkably difficult to determine what's really going on. The ones I've seen from time to time lack just enough detail that you can't tell whether, for example, expansion into foreign markets in the first few years of Creative Cloud was compensating for reduced subscriptions in the early markets, or whether it's really looking great for them across the board.

Re:Quark Who?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hear hear! I'm still using CS4 but have upgraded to Quark 2016. When it gets to the point that my old software no longer runs on the latest OS, I'll think about going to Creative Cloud, but GIMP and Inkscape are looking better every day.

Subscription model makes sense for the developer/distributor but not for me.

Slippery slope

[Anonymous Coward]

I can see this moving from annual subscriptions, to monthly, to daily, to hourly.

"You have exceeded your hourly quota for the month. Provide a credit card for an additional 5 hours of Photoshop time."

Re:Slippery slope

[Anne Thwacks]

The trend will continue downwards until you are billed per CPU clock pulse.

Look how rich it made Ross Perot.

Re:Slippery slope

[Anonymous Coward]

Ross Perot was rich (and became such) before this trend started. But you just go ahead and blame someone who made their money (mostly) back in the 70's.

Re:Slippery slope

[tonique]

I can see this moving from annual subscriptions, to monthly, to daily, to hourly.

That's true already. We have hourly rates at work for eg. Arcgis and Mapinfo. They something like €1.5 per hour.

Re:Slippery slope

[Proudrooster]

The cloud already does this (Amazon Web Services) and AT&T has charging for the byte down to a science in cellphone land. The really is the one thing AT&T Excels at, generating bills.

Re:Slippery slope

[Anonymous Coward]

Time to drum up software neutrality

Vendor lock-in too high a price for usability

[SirGarlon]

This is just an extreme case of vendor lock-in, which has been a known risk of using proprietary software for decades. Vendor lock-in was one of the primary motivators for the free software movement.

Frankly, I do think proprietary software such as MS Office, PhotoShop, AutoCAD, etc. often offers a better user experience than free and open-source (FOSS) alternatives. I have been willing to bottle my FOSS sympathies and shell out cash for productivity software for a long time for that reason. When the UX is better, that's worth paying for.

Once the vendor starts blocking me from access to my own intellectual property, that's a deal-breaker. First it's a moral outrage. Second, for people who won't factor morals into their business decisions, it's an extreme and unacceptable business risk. Now that we have a word for "ransomware," we can call this subscription model what it is.

I know people will say "Adobe will never kill PhotoShop." Never is very long time. People used to say General Motors would never go bankrupt, or Lotus would never kill Lotus 1-2-3.

No deal. Even if the subscription were "free." I'm looking at you, Google.

Re:Vendor lock-in too high a price for usability

[Bert64]

A free subscription is arguably worse, as you have less legal comeback in the event they choose to discontinue service.

At least in the case of photoshop, you have the option to export your data in open (jpeg, png etc) formats for use in other tools. I'd not subscribe to a service without at least some provision to get the data out in the event of cancellation.

Re:Vendor lock-in too high a price for usability

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're conflating two different issues into one. There's the problem of subscription-only software, and then there's proprietary formats. Using proprietary formats is what causes painful and costly vendor lock-in.

I can use non-free software to edit files in open formats, for instance, SVG, and if I'm unhappy with the software or decide to stop paying that subscription, it's perfectly possible to switch to Inkscape or something like that. I'm not saying this transition would be painless, but it's a lot easier than trying to migrate from Illustrator when all you have is .ai files.

Re:Vendor lock-in too high a price for usability

[squiggleslash]

Frankly, I do think proprietary software such as MS Office, PhotoShop, AutoCAD, etc. often offers a better user experience than free and open-source (FOSS) alternatives

While this is often true, I'm surprised MS Office is on that list - OpenOffice/LibreOffice haven't always been ideal, but as the MS Office UI has deteriorated, the ribbon being the big killer, OO/LO has vastly improved.

When I use OO/LO, I don't generally have sixteen tabs open in my web browser along the lines of "remove section break office" / "remove gap between tab cell top and first paragraph" / etc.

The only reason I use Word more than LO's equivalent is that Word's document format is the industry standard, and LO just doesn't support accurately for anything other than very plain text. What gets spat out by LO tends to load into Word in a way that needs cleaning up afterwards. Otherwise I'd use it exclusively, it's a better UI, easier to navigate and more intuitive.

Re:Vendor lock-in too high a price for usability

[Anonymous Coward]

A free subscription is arguably worse, as you have less legal comeback in the event they choose to discontinue service.

When it comes to software targeted at companies I've never encountered a vendor that intentionally pisses their customers off in that way.
The big problem is mergers and bankruptcies.

If a larger company buys the IP and just decides to discontinue it in favor of their own product.
They may very well decide that they have no obligation to the previous customers, they bought the IP, not the service agreement. They also have a legal team to make sure that they are right.

If the vendor files for bankruptcy you are also screwed. Whatever resources they still had will be sold off to pay any debts and whoever manages the bankruptcy doesn't really care if what they sell off is a server, workstation or leftover junk from the 90's. He doesn't deal with computers, can't tell the difference and it is not his job to care about previous customers.

Re:Vendor lock-in too high a price for usability

[Anonymous Coward]

Frankly, I do think proprietary software such as MS Office, PhotoShop, AutoCAD, etc. often offers a better user experience than free and open-source (FOSS) alternatives.

I disagree, but for a peculiar reason. I need my software to do as it's told, not guess what I might have wanted and do that instead. I don't need "WYSIWYG" (insofar as that, anyway), so I use vi* and I write my letters in troff with a custom macro set. It means that I can write down what I'd like to say, and it'll come out with my personal branding and all the trimmings. Of course I preview and proofread, but that concerns the content. The rest is sorted properly and well, not made up on the spot every time.

Now, I don't know how you'd do that with image editing, and so on, but this sort of workflow is not the kind of thing commercial vendors even try to facilitate. It's all "user experience", not "what are good tools to build multi-application multi-vendor integrated workflows out of?" It's "the program has to look nice for the user", what the Germans call "clickibunti". That thing is not the thing I need.

Meaning that proprietary software only gets that extra if you commit to their walled garden. In that sense, the subscription model just makes sense, also "everybody does it", and it fits well with the trends in modern accounting, where writing off is too hard so just throw monies at a subscription or lease contract and the auditors will give you a certificate of leanness, or whatever it is they do.

I have been willing to bottle my FOSS sympathies and shell out cash for productivity software for a long time for that reason. When the UX is better, that's worth paying for.

If that's worth it to you then more power to you. Me, I never understood why FOSS wanted to even try to beat the commercials at their own game and for no pay to boot. It's just stupid. Make your own thing and win users on empowering them better.

Once the vendor starts blocking me from access to my own intellectual property, that's a deal-breaker. First it's a moral outrage. Second, for people who won't factor morals into their business decisions, it's an extreme and unacceptable business risk. Now that we have a word for "ransomware," we can call this subscription model what it is.

Apparently many, many people have trouble even seeing that risk.

* nvi, not vim, TYVM. My preference and also an illustration how the "FOSS" world likes to assume just like the stereotypical "normal user" crowd blindly assumes every computer will have, say, a full redmond office suite and no other.

Re:Vendor lock-in too high a price for usability

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean like BIAS makes of Peak audio? When they went out of business and their license servers when offline so did my version of Peak... all I was left with was a rubbish pile of bits.

Re:Vendor lock-in too high a price for usability

[Rhacman]

Agree about using Word over LO. I tried to switch a few years back and while I was impressed by LO the formatting was always screwed up if you opened the document in Word. It drives me nuts that Office has added little that I care about since the late 90s and gotten by selling a repeatedly re-skinned product but there just isn't a viable substitute.

Re:Vendor lock-in too high a price for usability

[SirGarlon]

Oh, I hate the ribbon bar as much as the next person! But once I started working with LibreOffice heavily its shortcomings became clear -- lack of basic reliability in things like applying a text style and having it affect the selected text, and only the selected text, consistently. Your mileage may vary, but for me, the more I used MS Office the more I came to grudgingly accept it, while the more I used LibreOffice the more I cursed it for odd little glitches and stability problems.

Re:Vendor lock-in too high a price for usability

[Anonymous Coward]

"A free subscription is arguably worse, as you have less legal comeback in the event they choose to discontinue service."

free software doesn't stop working just because it stops being developed.

Re:Vendor lock-in too high a price for usability

[Bert64]

Who said anything about free software?

A free subscription stops working as soon as the provider shuts off the services it depends on.

It's Easier

[Anonymous Coward]

Subscription models (at least in a professional setting) are actually much easier to deal with. First, they are a fixed, known cost each year....I can budget $99 for a license and I know it will be that (or about that) each year. With perpetual licensing, it's more like $600 one year, and then none the next, and then $600 again....much harder to budget for that. In addition, most companies have been actually giving *more* with subscription models. I used to buy only Illustrator and Photoshop, but now I get any and all in their suite.

Re:It's Easier

[Cro Magnon]

One problem there is, my expenses aren't always fixed, known costs. Maybe I just had major car expenses, or my roof collapsed (or both) right when my software is expiring. If I own the software, I can keep running the old version until I'm ready to upgrade.

Good and bad

[ColonelClaw]

My company is in the architectural visualisation sector, so that means we are utterly dependant on Autodesk AND Adobe software. Lucky us! The subscription system has it's pros and cons. Pros are that you get the latest and greatest technologies as soon as they become available (and bugs ofc). Cons is you are totally at their mercy, and in certain cases we pay much more than we used to. To be honest, I'm not so bothered about Adobe, their software is still cheap, as far as I'm concerned, and Photoshop is one of the most refined and evolved tools I've ever used (been using it professionally since v2.0). As for Autodesk, they are total price-gouging bastards. The money we have to spend - and make no bones about it, we HAVE to spend - on 3DS Max is outrageous. If there was a realistic alternative, we'd move in a flash. Except that would probably be owned by Autodesk too.

Re:Good and bad

[StormReaver]

...and make no bones about it, we HAVE to spend....

No, you don't. You CHOOSE to spend it, which is your prerogative. You CHOOSE to remain in your vendor-owned workflow, probably out of fear, but you're actually in a great position. You have the resources to absorb the additional hit to your business while you play with options for migrating away from it.

Major software vendors are still in the early phases of owning your business, and you still have options. If you stay with them, though, you willingly throw away your options and surrender yourself to them. In that case, you might as well start planning for shutting down your business, because you will eventually be paying all of your revenues to software licenses. They may seem cheap now, but I'm sure boiling lobsters think the same thing about the water temperature in the beginning.

Re:Good and bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Definitely an interesting market dynamic.
A nice, but not huge market requiring a hard to make s/w package.
And the world depends on it to make things.

The only good I see is that it should create a great market for competition.
But for Autodesk, that might be redundant.
Doesn't Autocad still have whatever happened to Bentley and also SolidEdge to compete with.?

In the electronics cad industry, when a good public solution showed up, the incumbent bought them.

In the data base industry, similar story but the market was bigger, so the jury is still out.

Then of course, there is Office.

I'm not sure what the right answer is here.
The options are regulation or competition.
Office shows what happens with defined exchange formats.
A toe in the water compromise might be that if you have a temporary license, then it can be a perpetual license to at least open and output, but not edit your design. Isn't there is a free viewer to do that already?

Re:Good and bad

[Anonymous Coward]

They can only choose to use 3DS Max as much as they can choose to be competitive in that market. Autodesk's stronghold in that market is that powerful, you can either use them, or exit the market. That is the case in a lot of industries.

Re:Good and bad

[Anonymous Coward]

No one asked for pros and cons, dipshit.

Re:Good and bad

[Anonymous Coward]

There are great alternatives: For example, take a look at the Nemetschek group for architectural design and rendering - https://www.nemetschek.com/en/

Or Affinity as an alternative to Adobe: https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/

There are other, but I've personally worked with both and they have great products (and no forced subscription).

Re:Good and bad

[Anonymous Coward]

No one asked for your inane rubbish either, dipshit.

Re:Good and bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Slow your roll. Sometimes OUR customers tell us what we need to use. If we want to stay in business we have to listen to them. If they want the work we produce in Autodesk formats for example we are handcuffed, and lots of customers live in that world.

Re:Good and bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Blender will read and write .fbx files. Switch to blender and send .fbx files to your customers.

Re:Good and bad

[jittles]

No, you don't. You CHOOSE to spend it, which is your prerogative. You CHOOSE to remain in your vendor-owned workflow, probably out of fear, but you're actually in a great position. .

You should stick to discussing industries that you actually know about. I am no architect, but have quite a few friends who are. My understanding is that they're constantly sending these files around to 3rd parties and everyone has to be on the same page. More sophisticated clients sometimes use the same tools for viewing the work you provide, too. Abandoning 3DS Max would likely mean you would be unable to deliver on your existing obligations and would also be unable to acquire new work. End of business.

Re:Good and bad

[jeff4747]

There is no realistic alternative to Autodesk when it comes to architecture. Back in ye olden days Versacad and Autocad were fighting it out, but Autocad won that battle.

There are people out there who make software that claims to do architectural design. Their products are not that much better than using MS Paint or Visio to try and design a building.

There really is only one player in this space. And they know it.

Re:Good and bad

[angel'o'sphere]

Post like this show you clearly have no clue about the CAD market.
You likely know that you have no clue, so why make an embarrasment about yourself?

Re:Good and bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Lightwave, Modo, C4D still offer perpetual licenses. And yes, they can do everything Max can. Features and workflows differ slightly between apps, but they all do the same thing. Autodesk loves it when you think they are the only game in town.

Re:Good and bad

[Anonymous Coward]

dafuq? If you work in an industry you need to use their standard file format. Go ahead and send around that investment banking prospectus with something that OpenOffice or Google Docs exported to ".doc" format I'm sure everything will be perfectly fine.

Hate the sub model...

[Anonymous Coward]

...for home use. When a product goes sub model, that's my incentive to find a usable free version to use instead. And I'm almost always successful.

For business use I love the sub model as it helps us stay up to date. In the business world if you're on the sub model, the payments just keep flowing from accounting and you stay up to date. However, discrete purchases never get updated because that's too big a lump sum each time...

Perpetual fallback license

[Anonymous Coward]

JetBrains sells some of their software (mostly development tools) via a subscription model. But there is a very user-friendly catch: If you subscribe for more than a year, then end your subscription, then you are eligible for a "perpetual fallback license". That is a permament license for sligthly-out-of-date versions of the software. Obviously you won't get big updates for it, but it is yours forever.
https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What-is-perpetual-fallback-license-

I think this a reasonable and customer-friendly compromise.

Re:Perpetual fallback license

[easyTree]

In my experience it's not slightly out of date, it's twelve months out of date!

I'm out

[Anonymous Coward]

anything perpetual subscription based is a endless money pit. Give me a software, I do not need your shitty updates, until I will decide I do.

Open source options benefit from this.

[substance2003]

As a user of Blender, I am fine with Autodesk's destructive attitudes. I've noticed that some animation studios are now providing both money to the Blender Institute and software coders to help it's development. It may still feel like a drop in the bucket but Blender is capable to do many of the tasks needed out there already.
Now I know that won't cover all aspects but maybe other programs such as FreeCAD will get a boost from these vendor lock in tactics.
If Gimp could speed up their development, people might see a benefit to replace Photoshop in businesses too but I might be asking too much here.

Re:Open source options benefit from this.

[deathguppie]

Personally I've found Blender to be a more than capable 3d graphics sweet if you know how to use it. There are things that are better about 3DS and there are things that Blender can do that 3DS cannot.

FreeCAD is somewhat usable but early enough in it's development that the interface is a total mess. The workbenches seem thrown together and sometimes have identical tools that work just slightly differently. I've successfully used it personally and professionally so I can tell you that it is capable, but I would never recommend it to someone with years of time into Solidworks. (not if they want to retain their hair).

Re:Open source options benefit from this.

[substance2003]

FreeCAD is somewhat usable but early enough in it's development that the interface is a total mess. The workbenches seem thrown together and sometimes have identical tools that work just slightly differently. I've successfully used it personally and professionally so I can tell you that it is capable, but I would never recommend it to someone with years of time into Solidworks. (not if they want to retain their hair).

I've barely touched FreeCad and agree with what you are saying as I felt so lost in the interface. What I feel is that with AutoCAD in a subscription model, if FreeCAD was able to speed up their development to the point where more people can make use of it, it could see a rise in investment the same as Blender is seeing at the moment. Remember, Blender may be open source but people can donate to it or use the Blender Cloud service (which is purely optional unlike a subscription model) to fund it and companies of all kinds are pitching in with money and coders for their needs. With increased funding to FreeCAD and Gimp, these tools could at some point become viable alternatives not only for the masses but companies needing them and a way to force the proprietary vendors to rethink their subscription model.

Re: Open source options benefit from this.

[UnsignedInt32]

I have been paying for Blender Cloud for while probably making it the most money I paid to the 3DCG production software to date. I love the project and it worth every penny I paid, I haven't felt the same way for the other 3D production softwares I have purchased in the past.

No.

[mfh]

A lot more than that.

Re:No.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing fixes subscription-only software like subscription-only software.
Nothing fixes proprietary formats like proprietary formants.
Nothing fixes costly vendor lock-in like costly greedy vendor lock-ins.
Nothing fixes high prices like high prices.
There's nothing better than stupid greed to open the door for a new business or idea to slip in and upset the market.
It has happend and will again.

Re:No.

[Anonymous Coward]

It has been quite a long time since I've seen a post from a 2-digit account here. I tip my cap to you, Sir|Ma'am|Flipper.

Hard Pass on subscriptions!

[Anonymous Coward]

I (personally) and the groups I managed at work (professionally) were regular and loyal users of Adobe Creative Suite ... right up until the instant they switched to the subscription model and we stopped. Made several stops by their tradeshow booths at NAB and SIGGRAPH to let them know how I/We felt, and I thought I presented a strong case for at least offering both options to users. Y'all know how they responded. We never bought from them again and continue to use the last CS we were able to purchase.

Just say no...

[hyades1]

One of my friends is a top level graphic designer. He has simply stayed with a bought-and-paid-for version of PhotoShop...CS5, I believe. There is literally nothing he can't do with it.

His comment about Adobe's attempt to force him to rent the new version and effectively put his business under their control was simple and direct. He said (and yes, this is a quote), "Adobe can go fuck itself."

I've done photography at the professional level and use Lightroom (mostly) and CS2 (for occasions when I have to do serious retouching). This was never an issue for me, because I don't need the newest bells and whistles for what is now more a hobby than a profession.

I echo my friend's sentiments, though. I will never put myself into a situation where Adobe might be able to forbid me from having access to my own work. I can't imagine what kind of idiot would do so.

Re:Just say no...

[Anonymous Coward]

> There is literally nothing he can't do with it.

Which is why newer versions of CC save files that are not backwards-compatible. Fine if you work in isolation but good luck picking up assets from anyone else.

Re:Just say no...

[Anonymous Coward]

This works fine right up to the point some future OS or OS update breaks CS5.

Re:Just say no...

[Anonymous Coward]

He said (and yes, this is a quote), "Adobe can go fuck itself."

Said the whore to the rapist.
He's still using Adobe software and meanwhile Adobe doesn't even know he exists. His futile and ineffectual anger is just pathetic.
If he actually felt that way about it he should switch to an alternative (krita reads and writes .psd files just fine) and put his money where his mouth is so to speak.

Re: Just say no...

[donstenk]

I had an old version of photoshop elements that stopped working after upgrading OS X. Same may happen to Photoshop proper at some time. The Gimp is enough for my needs and when it wonâ(TM)t be I may try pixelmator.

Re:Just say no...

[hyades1]

He delivers a finished product, so that's not really an issue. For example, if you had contracted him to develop a logo for your company, or a whole unified look from letterhead to the sign on the factory and head office building and all your advertising, you'd get it in file formats best suited to your needs, and universally used by the ad agencies and other marketing and media companies yours would deal with.

I don't know that he's ever brought in outside work still in one of Adobe's native file formats, like psd or psb. I would tend to doubt it.

Re:Just say no...

[hyades1]

Somehow you seem to have missed the fact that the software he is using is bought and paid for. He owns it. And why would you assume he is angry?

Now why don't you go back to blowing your dog, or whatever else it is you do in your mom's basement when you aren't trying to earn your allowance.

That's why I don't use Adobe or Autodesk products

[sjbe]

All used to be well in the world of Digital Content Creation (DCC) until two very major DCC software makers -- Adobe and Autodesk -- decided to force a monthly subscription model on pretty much every software package they make to please Wall Street investors

Which is why I don't use any of their software that requires subscriptions for the software to work. I'd like to use Lightroom and Photoshop but there isn't a way in hell I'm paying for a subscription to use them. I have zero interest in software that stops working if I don't pay every month. If it were just a maintenance fee where I get updates but can stop anytime with the software continuing to work that would be different. I'm certainly not going to needlessly tie myself in perpetuity to their revenue model. I want to upgrade at my schedule when it makes economic and technical sense for me. I quite simply can, will, and have found other solutions if they insist on a subscription for their software. Fortunately there are good open source alternatives for my particular needs.

This is why many people didn't move beyond CS6

[Chas]

When they saw that they were going to be forced into extortionware like this, they essentially told Adobe to fuck the hell off.

Sure, very well-to-do companies can afford perpetual payments.

But smaller creators who still need access scrimp and save and simply buy a copy of CS5 or CS6 when they can find it.

Sure, up front it's more. But ammortize it out over time.

CS6 was released in mid-2011. Coming up on 7 years here.
It was discontinued in late 2013.

Even if it was $1000 (which it wasn't) at inception, that's basically be just under $12/month ownership cost at this point.
Or you could have been spending $20/month for Photoshop CC since mid 2013 (about $1200).
Hell, the bastards don't even cut you any kind of financial break for prepaying for a year!
And god help you if you want to pay month-to-month instead of an annual contract that's paid monthly. Tack an extra $10/month on!

Fuck extortionware.

Re:This is why many people didn't move beyond CS6

[Dahlgil]

Adobe's decision to go subscription only has saved me a lot of money as it caused me to stop my habit of buying PS upgrades every year. I'm on CS4 and perfectly fine with that. Lightroom will be a different story since I'm going to finallyneed to purchase Capture One (which I've long preferred anyway), but at least I can keep my current perpetually licensed copy of Lightroom 6 for as long as I want without monthly cost while I migrate over.

Re:This is why many people didn't move beyond CS6

[Anonymous Coward]

When they saw that they were going to be forced into extortionware like this, they essentially told Adobe to fuck the hell off.

Sure, very well-to-do companies can afford perpetual payments.

But smaller creators who still need access scrimp and save and simply buy a copy of CS5 or CS6 when they can find it.

Sure, up front it's more. But ammortize it out over time.

CS6 was released in mid-2011. Coming up on 7 years here.
It was discontinued in late 2013.

Even if it was $1000 (which it wasn't) at inception, that's basically be just under $12/month ownership cost at this point.
Or you could have been spending $20/month for Photoshop CC since mid 2013 (about $1200).
Hell, the bastards don't even cut you any kind of financial break for prepaying for a year!
And god help you if you want to pay month-to-month instead of an annual contract that's paid monthly. Tack an extra $10/month on!

Fuck extortionware.

AKA software Mafia.

Yes and No

[Anonymous Coward]

Great for hobbyists or someone who's interested in trying out something new.

Horrible for professionals and businesses that depend on the software.

But what's really important, is that it's great for shareholders, and really, does anything else but the shareholders matter anymore?

Simple

[StormReaver]

It's very simple, really. Richard Stallman was right, and saw this coming over 30 years ago. It's better to use inferior Free software than it is to use the world's best non-Free software. In some cases, it's even better to resort to pencil and paper than to rely upon non-Free software. I fought against this notion for years, but it finally clicked for me about 20 years ago when all the proprietary software I relied upon was pulled out from under me.

I could write a very long treatise as to why Free software is always a better choice than non-Free software. One major point is that you will learn how to make Free software work for you, even when it has missing features, and will then be free of the near absolute power wielded against you by large corporate interests which do not dovetail with your own.

Re:Simple

[Anne Thwacks]

I fought against this notion for years, but it finally used an Oracle product.

That was the last straw. There is no way I would ever use proprietary software for anything mission critical again.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

During this time of DRM everywhere, it is always a glorious feeling to be able to carry all your tools in an USB stick and install them (or not) legally in whichever suitable machine comes around and continue working.

Re:Simple

[DarkRookie]

I am not giving up Office. I will give up Windows before that.
OpenOffice and Libre Office do not compare for me at least.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

What I am waiting for is for companies to start revoking licenses of people if they protest or don't like their software. For example, back in the early 2000s, Verant banned someone from Everquest because they didn't like their fan fiction (even though it was supremely lousy writing... but had nothing to do with behavior on the game itself.) I can see companies pulling licenses from people who don't toe the line, or bitch about their products in forums. The EULA allows them to, so why wouldn't they? It might be that companies might start doing what casinos do, and if someone gets banned from one, they get banned from all. Which means someone who is a F/OSS advocate could never run Windows, use Office or Photoshop, or use AutoCAD, should they choose to be a machinist.

Link here:

Stallman has some valid points, especially in an industry where all your tools to do your job can be taken from you on a whim.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

It's very simple, really. Richard Stallman was right

On one account and wrong on a dozen others.

Don't disregard him, but take whatever he says with a grain of salt.

Re:Simple

[Rhacman]

As a hobbyist, the sky is the limit with free software. In a hobby it is less about how much time a task takes and more about learning and personal development.

In a company, time is money. If I prepare doc files in Libre Office and they don't look the same when opened in MS Word then not only was my effort wasted but the person who had to fight with opening my document. Time spent compensating for a missing feature quickly adds up to the cost of a software subscription or support contract. As long as companies can be more productive and more profitable using proprietary software they will continue to do so and they'd be foolish to do otherwise. Yes, there is risk involved in that if the software companies get too greedy it will impact the bottom line, but until then productivity will trump idealism.

Re:Simple

[whizzter]

Sadly ideology doesn't pay. The simple fact is that tools like Gimp, Lib/OO-office,video-editing and Blender are far far behind the commercial offerings and people betting on the closed source offerings will almost always make more money and have enough to offset the costs.

Out of these programs the only suite that really tries to improve things is Blender that has had pushes to improve it's UI (because even the die-hards remembers the bad learning curve they had).

I made my masters thesis in GDocs(drafts) and Libre Office(final version) and the time spent on stupid behaviours was actually pretty big. Some crash bugs in LO-Impress on a contract forced my hand to buy in MS-O and it's been worthy every penny for those "soft" contracts because on top of unifying menus/toolbars the ribbon interface also unified key-beindings in the programs leading to me being able to do more than 95% of the work in Powerpoint with the KEYBOARD! (yes, MS has been better for keyboard users on this front)

However GIMP is still the prime example of how badly opensource developers manages UI's. Downloaded GIMP a few months back to give it another chance and almost immediately i ran into stupid things that modern graphics programs shoudn't worry about. Namely that creating a new layer required me to specify the layer dimensions manually!, Photoshop has managed this automatically since the first versions but the opensource "equivalent" in 2017 still requires you to fiddle with these things manually (and frankly no artist will ever want to control that if the program can just auto-resize things on demand).

Open source has worked great for many things but when it comes to user interfaces we always seem to be stuck with the descisions of the initial programmers and sadly those has historically often been bad. This in turn has been a barrier of entry for new software since open source wisdom has been to pool behind whataver exists and is good enough to make it "great", but when bad UI descisions are more or less set in stone it won't really happen.

I don't know exactly how the open source community could and should improve things but things do need to change. One solution could be to found some productivity software company that does to open source productiviy software what Red Hat did for making money on server software, the question of course is how to bootstrap such a company. (And would the established OS operating system companies be willing to hand over enough control to such a company?)

Re:Simple

[Kevin Oldman]

I actually agree with this. I do in fact use free alternatives no matter how crashy, shitty and unintuitive they are.

Re:Simple

[dslbrian]

Sadly ideology doesn't pay. The simple fact is that tools like Gimp, Lib/OO-office,video-editing and Blender are far far behind the commercial offerings and people betting on the closed source offerings will almost always make more money and have enough to offset the costs.

Out of these programs the only suite that really tries to improve things is Blender that has had pushes to improve it's UI (because even the die-hards remembers the bad learning curve they had).

The Blender of early 2000's is not the Blender of today. A couple years ago I had an opportunity to upgrade an older Cinema4D with associated cost, and I decided to try out a recent Blender just to see what its current state was. I was absolutely blown away by how advanced and powerful it is now. It was way more capable than my (admittedly old) C4D install, and some of the plugins for it are just amazing.

Although its default UI is improved, it can be even further improved (IMO) with a free addon, Sensei Format, giving it a nice streamlined workflow (the dev for that also put up a huge 100+ array of tutorial videos on YouTube). I also got a low cost addon, Zero Brush, which replaced the old C4D bodypaint (although I believe this core function is built-into Blender and it is really a UI overhaul also).

But Blender is an artistic tool, and another thing I need in my workflow is a 3D CAD modeler. In this space I don't see OSS (or low cost) alternatives. I've tried FreeCAD (frustrating workflow), and low-end tools like Sketchup just don't cut it. Closest thing I've found is DesignSpark Mechanical (which is a stripped down SpaceClaim). SpaceClaim itself has a perpetual license for $3500 (cough), which is high, but overall it is a good push/pull modeler. Autodesk Fusion 360 is there, but like other Autodesk things it is subscription based (they lure hobbyists with free non-commercial use - but frankly that could disappear overnight if they so decided). It also has a "cloud" tie-in, and requires an online connection. I'd be very interested to know if there are any other good options in this space.

Just bugs me.. every month

[fuzzyf]

I'm much more restrictive about spending money on a monthly basis compared to one-time purchases. So for me personally they lose sales. I would have no problem purchasing a license at irregular intervals for Adobe Lightroom and maybe also Photoshop, but I will not pay for a subscription
The thought of it costing money every month just bugs me. And it's easy to calculate exactly how much it will end up costing
Take 25 years of Lightroom and Photoshop as an example.
$10 * 12 months * 25 years = $3000


But Isuspect this works quite well for those who have to use their products.

Re:Just bugs me.. every month

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm much more restrictive about spending money on a monthly basis compared to one-time purchases. So for me personally they lose sales. I would have no problem purchasing a license at irregular intervals for Adobe Lightroom and maybe also Photoshop, but I will not pay for a subscription

The thought of it costing money every month just bugs me. And it's easy to calculate exactly how much it will end up costing

Take 25 years of Lightroom and Photoshop as an example.

$10 * 12 months * 25 years = $3000

But Isuspect this works quite well for those who have to use their products.

Unless your plan is to upgrade Photoshop, which cost $699 when CS6 was last available, just three times over those 25 years, then sure. But most likely, the OSes will change 10 times or so in all that and your old software won't even install.

And it comes down to how you use it. If you're a hobbyist who uses it twice a month for shits and giggles, you're right, you can do with 10 year old software. But if you're an active photographer, for instance, and you can't make use of the latest editing techniques to make your work current, then you'll fall behind and lose your clients.

Now, you might say "But you can do everything with the current tools if you are clever!" That's half right. A couple features, such as local black and white level adjustments in Lightroom, are not replicable with the previous version; others, like Dehaze (which is just a midtone contrast adjustment), are, but are more efficient with the new tools. Local black and white can be mimicked by opening the image in photoshop, make a copy layer, adjusting the levels of that layer, and then masking out what you didn't want. Repeat for each piece of the image you want to adjust. You might spend a few hours doing that, which is fine if you have five images to edit and they're just going on your personal Instagram, but if you've got 1000 images to go through and another wedding to shoot the next weekend, cutting your time to minutes seems greatly preferable.

Re:Just bugs me.. every month

[Anonymous Coward]

In my case, I use these types of software for personal and volunteer work. I'm not making any money, nor are the organizations that I'm working with. I may only use the software two or three times a year, but I like having the ability to get quality results when using the right tools.

I can potentially justify a one-time purchase to have goods tools at my disposal, but I know exactly what my cost is. I don't upgrade often - my needs are such that I can work within the limitations of the software rather than buying an upgraded version. But I did buy a license.

For a monthly subscription, I would be paying for something I'm not typically using - only for the privilege of having the software installed. Fortunately, there are typically workarounds such as open source or legacy (offline) versions of the software. So, I do not currently plan to move to any subscription based software. Though, I'm not sure how long I can hold out based on the trends that I'm seeing.

I pay for Adobe CC but keep a pirated copy around

[Anonymous Coward]

If life goes to pot and I can no longer afford the monthly fee, I refuse to go without the software. I keep pirated copies of all rental software around. As long as the developers are working on the software and making good progress, I see a benefit. I subscribed to Adobe CC because I saw significant benefits in what Adobe had done since CS6 and wanted in on that. I refuse to pay for Office 365; there is nothing of value to me that Office 2016 does that wasn't already doable (and more easily so) in Office 2003 and the older versions tend to be faster, so I keep old pirated copies of Office lying around and also use LibreOffice a lot.

I absolutely will not pay for Autodesk software; it's just way too expensive. Same goes for audio software. Any software that requires a USB hardware key is definitely getting pirated; that hardware key crap has caused individual composers to lose thousands of dollars due to a hardware key failure at crunch time. QuickBooks is a terrible piece of software that I only use because I have no choice, so I will never pay for that because Intuit writes some of the worst software in existence. When they made it so multi-user mode required a Windows host unless you use Enterprise I soured mightily on them, as if I needed my opinion lowered even more.

If you lose the use of a piece of software, your data that requires that software to be usable is also effectively lost. If you use subscription software and you suddenly have no job and your savings are depleted, what are you going to do to get back on your feet with no way to put together a proper portfolio of your Illustrator work since your Adobe subscription lapsed?

Thanks to piracy, we're not beholden to software makers trying to force subscription shit down our throats. It's the internet generation's way of voting with your wallet.

Microsoft sucks??

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember when Microsoft came up with this model for Office. (now office 365)
There was outrage! They were beaten heavily by industry at the time.

Personally, I think that all major software companies will do this, for one very simple reason:
They need a constant revenue stream, and have given up the fight to convince you of why you need the next version.

Put simply, there's nothing that we do with Office today, that we couldn't do with Office 2000. That assertion may not be true for many companies, but in my observations (as a contractor) of all the companies I've worked for, this appears to be the case. Extend that to other vendors such as Adobe, and for the most part, there's nothing in their most up-to-date software that people were living quite happily without perhaps 10 years ago (or more?)

It's that ever diminishing return on investment that they're fighting - in essence, their greatest competitors are previous versions of the software they've already sold to you. - and it is increasingly harder to sell you newer versions based on buzz alone. We're much harder to sell to. To top it off, there's 3rd party extensions (often free) that are stealing innovation away from the vendor, making it even hard for them to justify yet another version!
There's obviously a myriad of reasons we can think of if we try - but hopefully you see my point.

Re:Microsoft sucks??

[speedlaw]

I recall WriteNow 4.0, which was a willing companion to word smithery. At some point I ended up with Word, which just sucks as it over thinks everything you do. I don't want to change the paragraph style and fonts if I backspace too many times, don't want to auto number paragraphs, etc. I'm using Pages now, and only convert to Word if the client needs it. I've so far avoided the "pay us 365 days" model. I can't imagine how it is if you have formats you can't convert easily...

Re:Microsoft sucks??

[amxcoder]

That's why I'm still using Office 2010. I do not want to RENT my office suite. Coincidentally, office 2010 still does everything I need it for, and have not had issues opening up any files from clients that may be using newer versions either.

Avoid

[Bongo]

If at all possible, avoid it.
But if as a professional you rely on these tools, well that's just another overhead.
And fair enough, if these companies have run out of good features and now they just want rent.
I suppose they could take it a step further and start demanding a percentage of your profits...

Re:Avoid

[ausekilis]

Don't make them become game engines!

I can see Epic, Crytek and Id Software yelling "Bullshit! that's our job!"

Control of YOUR data

[sjbe]

It brings up a question I always ask: Who owns your data?

THAT is exactly the key question. It's the reason I refuse to use Lightroom to manage my photos. I'm not about to tie myself in perpetuity to another company and effectively hand over control of my data to them. While I'm not saying it's always wrong to make that choice it's a choice one should make with extreme caution. It would be one thing if the software continued to work if you stopped paying the subscription and you just stopped getting upgrades. But to disable the software and effectively deny you access to your data if you stop paying for the subscription is just shady as it gets to my mind.

Re:Control of YOUR data

[Gr8Apes]

You can, I think, still get a permanent license of Lightroom. However, I wouldn't, as Adobe has already stated they're moving everything to the subscription model. Actually, I'm in the market for some decent photo management software, any suggestions on competitors for Lightroom and the dead Aperture?

Re:Control of YOUR data

[Varenthos]

You can still purchase Lightroom 6 as a perpetual license.

Re:Control of YOUR data

[ctilsie242]

Maybe what might be needed is a bounty system to entice someone to create an application and do project management duty. Get enough people together who are willing to shell out $20 or so for something with Aperture's functionality, and someone, somewhere might be able to get something together. From there, the project would get critical mass and likely be a solid competitor.

Re:Control of YOUR data

[yzf750]

Capture One Pro. Although they offer yearly they also offer perpetual. Hopefully they do not do away with the perpetual one.

Re:Control of YOUR data

[Gr8Apes]

Yeah, this is the only established competitor I know of. On 1 is another, but I haven't used their stuff yet. The rest are new, and I haven't really seen anyone rise to the top yet.

Re:Control of YOUR data

[nitehawk214]

But it is unsupported. Adobe knows that eventually you will have to upgrade.

Re:Control of YOUR data

[Anonymous Coward]

https://www.darktable.org

Its the linux knock off. I haven't tired it yet, but it looks decent.

Re:Control of YOUR data

[Anonymous Coward]

I use DigiKam to manage my photos. It's not as comprehensive in editing capabilities as Lightroom, but it's always undergoing improvement. And I'm not stuck paying out the rear for features I don't need anyway.

Open Source ftw!

https://www.digikam.org/

Re:Control of YOUR data

[lingu1st]

On linux/bsd/mac (not Windows): Darktable.

Re:Control of YOUR data

[Gr8Apes]

Anything non-windows is welcome. I have heard of it, haven't tried it yet either.

Re:Control of YOUR data

[jddj]

PyCharm (jetbrains) has a license something like you mention. Your "subscription" provides you access to the latest version all the time. If you decide not to subscribe, you still have the latest version that spanned a subscription year. A teense more complicated than that, but pretty good.

https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc...

Have been very happy with the product, and satisfied with the license terms.

I haven't subscribed to any Adobe product since they went down the extortion path. Still using my latest perpetually-licensed Creative Suite, and I guess I will until it breaks. Then I'll have to move to a new toolset.

Re:Control of YOUR data

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you own your house? If you believe that, go ahead and quit paying your property taxes and see how long you own your house/land...

Re:Control of YOUR data

[yzf750]

Capture One has a demo, 30 days full. That is what sold me. It is not Aperture, I knew that. I knew it was gone "sniff". I tried Photos, and knew I needed something else. Before I could decide to pay for Lightroom, Adobe went subscription, so I looked around. I tried Darkroom and it was promising, but then I tried a demo of Capture One, found a ton of tutorials, and I was happy. I bought it.

Re:Control of YOUR data

[Gr8Apes]

Capture One definitely has some nice features. I just haven't used it enough to commit to it yet. Maybe this year.

Re:Control of YOUR data

[Reziac]

I'd have used the term "extortion", but, yeah.

It's a blank cheque

[jago25_98]

Since there is no real limit on what might be required to get access to your data in the future, you're really writing a blank cheque for the future entrusting your data in such a contract.

It's foolish but so many do it. Try to point it out and you're labelled a conspiracy theorist.

Times may have changed but how short our memories? I remember getting shafted by this so many times in previous decades.

Own your data in a format you have control of or be prepared to lose it.

Things I've lost in the past:

- all my facebook contacts
- my financial privacy
- CAD files

I'm sure people have lost more when even money wasn't enough to rescue the data.

Re:It's a blank cheque

[Anonymous Coward]

We've seen this before:

"I'm altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further."

And if this can happen, always will happen.

Sub software...

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's an MMO game with constant fixes and updates of content and expansions I don't mind so much. Anything else gets tossed to the recycle bin.

Limp through gimp

[Anonymous Coward]

I did. I opened that hard to follow gui and learned the hell out of some gimp. Turns out both programs do the same things, adobe forced me to learn that the hard way, but now im grateful because gimp is free!

Unnecessary

[Anonymous Coward]

Software as a service will ruin the nature of truly owning a product. It can be beneficial under the right circumstances. Just as awful as loot crates in my opinion.

Can work

[Anonymous Coward]

Forced subscription software could maybe work in some cases but I wouldn't use it for CAD software.

We have many old projects that haven't been worked on for over a decade, but every now and then something old needs to be referenced or worked on.
Unless you can guarantee that the old installation files will work even if your company are bought up and the servers closed down then I can't use subscription software.

Heck, even if we just look at new projects it sucks to be in the "pay the fee or we lock away all your projects" situation.

Now, I don't mind paying a subscription fee for support and updates. I just need to be able to access the old files if you suck and I need to move on to a competitor.
Being able to dig up the old installation files, install the program and access old files is a requirement.
There are plenty of neat features in modern CAD programs I am willing to pay for but can live without if necessary.
Not being locked in to a specific vendor is a requirement I can't drop.

Tell me when GIMP is crippled

[Anonymous Coward]

Then I'll start to worry.

There's plenty of alternatives so just change

[Anonymous Coward]

In 2006 I decided I was fed up with the paying upgrades, and decided to move to linux and OS alternatives.
I run a boardgame publishing business, and need software to edit bitmap and vector images, video, and to make 3D modelling for 3D animated videos as well as for parts design. I also need desktop publishing.
Had I continued to use proprietary softwrae, i'd be using photoshop, illustrator, indesign, maya, solidworks and adobe premiere.
Instead I took the time to learn different tools, and use Inkscape, Krita, Gimp, Blender, freecad, Scribus, and KDEnlive.
Yes, the interfaces are not always as polished, and it takes time to learn. but it's stable, does the job, it's free, and I can still go back to other free or proprietary software when I'm not satisfied.
A few years ago when adobe started to go the subscription route I expected to see more people switch to free software. But the thins is : once you are used to something, it takes some effort to move to something else. It's not a matter of capacity of the software or even ease of use, it's a matter of being willing to make an effort to learn new ways, and to change.
So I say you want comfort and no change, well cough up. this has a price, you choose proprietary vendors, so pay what they ask and live with it.
The alternatives are free and available, but they require an actual effort on the user's end.

Re:There's plenty of alternatives so just change

[substance2003]

A few years ago when adobe started to go the subscription route I expected to see more people switch to free software. But the thins is : once you are used to something, it takes some effort to move to something else. It's not a matter of capacity of the software or even ease of use, it's a matter of being willing to make an effort to learn new ways, and to change. So I say you want comfort and no change, well cough up. this has a price, you choose proprietary vendors, so pay what they ask and live with it. The alternatives are free and available, but they require an actual effort on the user's end.

While there are many online resources to help a person learn software, I keep thinking that many still need a traditional way of learning. Many graphics design professionals went to a school to learn these tools and may need retraining in order to get proficient quickly. Maybe if there were a lot of schools willing to teach how to use these free/open source tools people would be more easily able to move away from the proprietary options. I know there are some schools out there but they are too few at the moment.

Re:There's plenty of alternatives so just change

[Anonymous Coward]

Those you listed are no alternatives. If you're just an amateur maybe, but professionals doing professional work need professional tools, not toys. Besides, if you are ever thinking of applying for a job involving image editing and processing, the mere mention of the word "GIMP" will result in your resume being trashed. Welcome to the real world.

Re:There's plenty of alternatives so just change

[substance2003]

Those you listed are no alternatives. If you're just an amateur maybe, but professionals doing professional work need professional tools, not toys. Besides, if you are ever thinking of applying for a job involving image editing and processing, the mere mention of the word "GIMP" will result in your resume being trashed. Welcome to the real world.

This is very true of Gimp and I feel the slow pace of development is one of the reasons. If they deployed new version more frequently they might have more traction. Now I know that Photoshop is the defacto program for Photo editing out there and that isn't changing anytime soon but looking at Blender where 5 years ago, no one in a studio would have dared to mention using it, now you see some studios listing it as software they use in-house and will hire people who have knowledge of Blender so there what could be a beginning of a shift there. However, in my opinion for Gimp to do the same, they need to change the way they develop the software.

Re:There's plenty of alternatives so just change

[Anonymous Coward]

So we're back to "Linux is free only if your time has no value"?

Re:There's plenty of alternatives so just change

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a reason we say its free as in beer

Adobe management is incompetent.

[Anonymous Coward]

Adobe management is incompetent.
They haven't a clue about security.
They have repeatedly abused their "customers." These are just more examples.

Stop giving them money.

You can do it!

It sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Lack of offline is a deal breaker. I need Illustrator for generating svgs and now I hack my way through Inkscape and it's annoying.

Not my problem

[sjbe]

I personally don't like it but it's one of the more surefire ways of reducing piracy whilst kicking your actual customers in the wallet to make up for any perceived piracy losses.

In my case it reduces piracy by keeping me from using their products at all. I'm not about to hand over control of my data to a company just so they can pad their bottom line to Wall Street. Sadly I'd actually pay for some of their products but they refuse to license them to me under terms I'm willing to accept.

Re:Not my problem

[Gr8Apes]

I too was willing to buy 1 or 2 products I was interested in until they announced they were moving to a subscription model. Instead of a casual user, they now have no user.

Re:Not my problem

[AvitarX]

Are you saying that as a casual user you'd rather pay $1200+ up front (Photoshop was $700 alone), than $40/month ($20/month/app)?

I know that after 2 years it becomes more expensive if you're not keeping up to date, but the subscription model seems more tailored for casual users than paying hundreds up front to me.

Re:Not my problem

[Gr8Apes]

I was willing to purchase Photoshop for $500, which was the price I was looking at when I considered it. I grimaced, but considered it, and then they announced the subscription model as they only option for the future, which indicated to me that updates/upgrades were already dead for perpetual licenses, so why bother? My needs aren't consistent, they're sporadic, so going through the activate/deactivate process every time I needed something to save money on the subscription was just too onerous and probably wouldn't have saved me much. So I continued with the tools I had, foregoing PS, and then alternatives started popping up that dealt with enough to meet at least the base needs. But, I'm always open to something new that will make the process better/easier.

Re:Not my problem

[torkus]

I fail to see how it reduces piracy. If TPB and other torrent sites are any indication, plenty of people are still avoiding the upfront or license costs just fine.

Now, some people MAY swallow a $100 sub over a $1500 license a bit easier but I really question how much they've really improved their income from those not inclined to spend money in the first place.

Re:Not my problem

[AvitarX]

The last list price of Photoshop was $700, but even at $500, that's what apparently is now 4 years of subscription.

And if you're such a sporadic user, why ever activate, just use the 30 free days whenever.

Re:Not my problem

[Gr8Apes]

Last I checked, it was roughly 2 years of subscription for PS.

Re:Not my problem

[AvitarX]

PS is $10/month

Re:Not my problem

[Gr8Apes]

It's $20/month, unless you get the photography plan, to which they've added it recently. I wonder what the difference is between the two?

Re:Not my problem

[Anonymous Coward]

One plan is the single app plan which allows one selection from their creative cloud suite of application plus 100gb storage and a portfolio website, premium fonts, and social media tools.

The other plan is the photography plan which includes photoshop, lightroom, lightroom classic, either 20gb (9.99) or 1tb(19.99) of storage. The 1TB Photography plan for three years cost roughly the same as Photoshop CS6 did, without Lightroom. If online storage isn't needed then the 20gb Photography plan is less expensive than paying full price plus any hypothetical upgrades Adobe would have release had they remained with perpetual licensing for Photoshop minus Lightroom. That makes it a better deal over perpetual licensing. Although it would have been best for them to keep perpetual licensing as a choice it doesn't mean that it is a disaster once someone stops paying for it. The worst that could happen is for someone to pay the remainder of their plan and lost access to software. The only way someone would lose their data is if all of their files are kept on the cloud with no other backups.

This calls for legislation.

[hellopolly]

Software companies should not be allowed to hold your creative work at ransom.

A subscription model in itself is not a problem. But companies that want to use this model should be forced to provide full specifications of their data model, so that you are able to take your business elsewhere whenever you want to.

My View?

[Zurkeyon3733]

My View is that its driving piracy to all new heights. Giving millions a NEW reason NOT to buy... But to Pilfer. And anyone who is on the subs model, DESERVES to have their IP Stolen. DON'T ROB PEOPLE! That Simple. If you are "SELLING" a product, then SELL it. I don't want to RENT your latest bugs, or a "Spot" at the table to my own industry! Software SUBS = FAIL

No product is unassailable

[OzPeter]

Back in the day Word Perfect* used to be *the* office software. But then another program came along along and supplanted it. The same thing can happen again to things like Photoshop and Autocad. But in fact there are already non-subscription based programs that do the majority of what most users need in a package. I used to have an old copy of Photoshop .. but I couldn't get it running properly on the latest macOS. So instead I switched to Affinity Photo (I prefer it over the Gimp). A lot cheaper than Photoshop and does all that I need plus more.

*I was amazed to see that Word Perfect is still lumbering along. I had no idea. Also Word Perfect supplanted things like Wordstar (of which I also have fond memories of running under CP/M)

Re:No product is unassailable

[zifn4b]

The same thing can happen again to things like Photoshop and Autocad. But in fact there are already non-subscription based programs that do the majority of what most users need in a package.

Can someone here remind this person how long slashdot has been saying GIMP is a suitable replacement for Photoshop, yet it's never happened. Has it already been 20 years? Wow... some things never change.

Re:No product is unassailable

[pipingguy]

"The same thing can happen again to things like Photoshop and Autocad"

I'm not so certain about that. They have such a lock on their customers and are YUGE companies able to BillGates any serious up and coming competition.

Re:No product is unassailable

[Anonymous Coward]

The law field has always kept Word Perfect alive. For some reason.

Re:No product is unassailable

[Voyager529]

*I was amazed to see that Word Perfect is still lumbering along. I had no idea. Also Word Perfect supplanted things like Wordstar (of which I also have fond memories of running under CP/M)

WordPerfect is still in existence because they got bought out a few times and ultimately ended up at Corel, a company I affectionately call "the software retirement home". With titles like WinZip, WinDVD, CorelDraw, Paint Shop Pro, and WordPerfect (which itself contains Paradox), it seems as though the company's plan is to play law-of-large-numbers on acquisitions of software titles which were de facto standards in their day. But I digress.

WordPerfect survives primarily because they have a solid niche in law firms. Legal documents depend heavily on the "Reveal Codes" functionality, which is kinda-sorta like a middle-of-the-road between WYSIWYG editing and LaTeX, which allows for consistent document formatting without either the weirdness of Word rearranging everything when you move an image one pixel to the left, or the learning curve of LaTeX for those who "only know Word". Reveal Codes begat document libraries (keeping in mind that law firms also notoriously keep everything forever), and templates, and plugins, and enough of a cottage industry around a highly profitable sector that has enabled it to avoid utter irrelevance.

All of that being said, I completely agree with your assessment that no program is beyond being dethroned. Oracle used to be the platform for databases (unless you were using IBM or small enough to use Access or Paradox), but newer databases commonly end up being designed in MariaDB or Postgres; even MS SQL Server has more favorable licensing. MS Office is still the standard, but GDocs is making inroads, especially in the education market. Good ol' Internet Explorer was the standard until Firefox chipped away at a solid clip, themselves supplanted by Chrome for many. Adobe themselves supplanted Quark with Indesign, and didn't take long to do so. Software comes and software goes, and while Adobe's decline will be incredibly gradual, it's far from impossible.

Re:No product is unassailable

[Anonymous Coward]

I completed my degree in 3D art using only GIMP to paint my textures.
But at this point I would consider Krita to be better than GIMP in a lot of ways.
As for how they compare to PS... If I were doing art as my day job instead of programming I would have absolutely no problem using Krita instead of PS. It doesn't matter to me that PS has nifty tools for certain edge cases because I almost never encounter them or I can work around without them-- it would hurt to lose certain efficiency features from PS, but they're not critical.
If someone else is paying for it and they don't mind being locked into Adobe's products then, fine, whatever. But if it was my business I'd require all my people to use open software if at all possible.

Re:No product is unassailable

[WaffleMonster]

*I was amazed to see that Word Perfect is still lumbering along. I had no idea.

It's the lawyers. They will never give up word perfect.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

It doesn't matter what you want.

[geekmux]

It doesn't matter if you wanted a smart TV or not, you'll take what maximizes profits and like it.

It doesn't matter if you wanted a headphone jack or not, you'll take what maximizes profits and like it.

It doesn't matter if you wanted to pay a one-time cost, you'll take what maximizes profits and like it.

It doesn't matter if you wanted a removable battery, you'll take what maximizes profits and like it.

It doesn't matter if you wanted A la carte, you'll take what maximizes profits and like it.

Bottom line is consumer opinion no longer matters. And don't give me that Vote with your Wallet crap. That's as dead as the concept of competition. The mega-corps could care less about the 5% of you that would actually stand up and "vote". The other 95% of mindless consumers just stand in line and beg for more product regardless of price. And Greed is infectious, which is exactly why we are seeing more SaaS mandates, not less. Shareholders and investors demand it.

And it's been this way for a long time now, so you might as well get used to it. Your entire life will be subscription-based 30 years from now.

Re:It doesn't matter what you want.

[zifn4b]

It's not about maximizing profits necessarily. Investors prefer to see subscription based revenue rather than one time purchases or contracts with optional renewal. They are more likely to invest in your stock if you are publicly traded. This has to do with how financials are reported in SEC filings using GAP. You see after the Enron scandal, the government stepped in and changed how financials should be reported in SEC filings because Enron "cooked their books". Sometimes the ripple effects of regulation aren't what you would expect. There needed to be something done in terms of regulatory reform for that issue but I wonder if there was a better solution.

Re:It doesn't matter what you want.

[zifn4b]

And by the way if you have a 401K or a 403B, you are a potential investor and driving this behavior as well...

Re:It doesn't matter what you want.

[geekmux]

It's not about maximizing profits necessarily. Investors prefer to see subscription based revenue rather than one time purchases or contracts with optional renewal.

When it comes to making highly proprietary hardware that barely lasts beyond the shitty factory warranties and support ends prematurely, it is about maximizing profits.

When it comes to preferring never-ending subscription models over one-time costs, it is about guaranteeing profit streams, which is just another way of maximizing profits over time.

Both of these actions serve Greed N. Corruption. Enron was so long ago companies have hired new cooks from Ireland and have recipes you've never even heard of. Any ancient regulation isn't doing a damn thing to help the consumer these days. Prices keep going up, hardware continues to become more and more proprietary, content continues to be shoved behind walled gardens and perpetual subscriptions, mega-corps continue to collude and dominate entire industries regardless of anti-monopoly laws, and competition effecting real change is dead before it even starts.

Re:It doesn't matter what you want.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bingo. Ever try to maximize returns on your retirement accounts or other stock market investments? You're not only an investor, you're one of the investors ultimately driving all sorts of bullshit corporate behavior.

Re:It doesn't matter what you want.

[blahplusplus]

Bottom line is consumer opinion no longer matters.

It has nothing to do with consumer opinion it's that the internet undermins consumer power, pre internet they had to physically give you the software if they wanted to get paid, post internet they can simply hold part of the software hostage and extract money from the serfs. Basically SaaS is fraud. The only reason it exists is because the average person is ignorant of how technology works. If the elite market participants were geographically close enough to influence the business then their anger would compel management to make user controlled software again.

Re:It doesn't matter what you want.

[BurningFeetMan]

"Your entire life will be subscription-based 30 years from now."

Which isn't a bad thing. My weekly fresh fruit & veg is ordered under a "subscription" model. Saves me from going to the supermarket thus I avoid the junkfood isle.

The problem here is price gouging & monopolies - not the subscription model itself. And I believe competition will be the answer to high prices. For example, if Airtable decided to increase their pricing by $$$, I can guarantee the first thing their customers will do is type in google "Airtable Vs...". But how about if we look at Airtable as the customer. Which vendors are they locked in with to deliver & maintain their product? What if the vendors that Airtable use suddenly jacked up their pricing by $$$, which coincidentally are the same vendors that Airtables competitors use too, so all these similar vendors all jack up their price in sync... Hmmmm...

Re:It doesn't matter what you want.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. You absolutely can still, always, vote with your wallet.

It's just that voting with your wallet is expensive. But it's supposed to be. If you want "cheap", then you are by definition the mass market. If you want nonstandard, custom options, those cost.

Re:It doesn't matter what you want.

[DCFusor]

I'm starting to think I'm going to be lucky by not living that long. When people have nothing more to lose, to they really start voting from the rooftops, or only if George Soros or CIA pay for that?

Re:It doesn't matter what you want.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bottom line is consumer opinion no longer matters. And don't give me that Vote with your Wallet crap.

I disagree. The sane option is to opt out. Choose nothing. Choose not to buy. I don't want a smart TV, so I won't buy one. If I want a headphone jack, I certainly wouldn't buy something that doesn't have one, but that's beside the point that I don't want any sort of "smart phone" at all. If A la carte is a reference to cable TV packages, in that case I happily ditched cable years ago. I may eventually ditch Netflix too, but for now $12/mo keeps the rest of the family happy. There is a wealth of free entertainment at the local public library - more books than I could ever read, audio books on CD if I prefer to listen, more movie and TV DVDs than I could watch in a lifetime. Beside the point, I'd rather just go outside for a walk than stare at any size glowing screen, which If I follow your list correctly everything is a reference to some electronic device, no?

Consumer opinion certainly matters. My opinion matters 100% to me. It may matter 0% to everybody else, but that makes no difference to me either way. I'll continue to not use facebook, not hold an iphone in front of my face instead of up to my ear (was that the official genius answer to "you're holding it wrong"?), not wear any sort of "activity tracker", or place an always-listening device in my home. If other people want to do so, go right ahead.

On topic to TFA though, this is exactly why I seek out and painfully learn OSS alternatives such as GIMP and LibreOffice, etc. I have been forced to use much commercial software over the years. The drive to conform is usually a social pressure, not technical. (RE: AutoCAD in the architecture field, Adobe in the "artist" field, etc.)

I say screw 'em, avoid 'em, and just get on with life. Enjoy your freedom. Don't surrender it.

Re:It doesn't matter what you want.

[david_thornley]

One thing that helps maximize profits is producing stuff the customers want. Apple was very good at that for a long time.

There's no reason not to get a smart TV even if you don't want the extra capability. It's likely cheaper to provide you with one choice (smart) than two (smart and not smart).

Things like the headphone jack and user-removable battery are definitely based on what the customers are going to want. If Apple makes iPhones nobody wants, Apple is in trouble. You may want them, but people like you are apparently a small segment of the market. Apple cares what the customers are going to want. Apple doesn't give a crap what you individually want.

Easy

[zifn4b]

I don't use it unless I need it for my job. Then I let my employer pay for it.

Should have supported open source software.

[Anonymous Coward]

But no, you called it "open sores", and laughed at names like gimp and gnome. Now who's laughing.

Not renting any software I can possibly help

[Jay Maynard]

The Parallels virtualization software for OS X is moving in this direction, though you can buy a perpetual license, at least for now.

There's a reason I still use Photoshop CS 6 Extended: as a hobbyist user, I can't justify $50 a month for software I only use once a month or so.

And no, don't tell me The GIMP is an acceptable substitute. It's just too different to allow my Photoshop knowledge and workflows to transfer.

Re:Not renting any software I can possibly help

[Anonymous Coward]

And no, don't tell me The GIMP is an acceptable substitute. It's just too different to allow my Photoshop knowledge and workflows to transfer.

Assuming The GIMP actually has the features you need, but just 'works different', maybe you should invest some time into it now.

If you don't, when CS6 stops working (e.g. old PC fails, new PC's OS will not run CS6) you'll be ready. The alternative is to do nothing and maybe get forced to take out an Adobe subscription when CS6 no longer runs - and maybe it'll be $100 per month.

Once we get to the point where no supported version of Windows will run CS6 or older, it's highly likely that Adobe will jack up its subscription rates regularly 'because they can'.

Re:Not renting any software I can possibly help

[dgatwood]

The Parallels virtualization software for OS X is moving in this direction, though you can buy a perpetual license, at least for now.

Meh. VirtualBox is open source and generally gets the job done. If Parallels wants to shoot themselves in the foot, hand them the gun and don't try to stop them. Nothing of value will be lost.

Re:Not renting any software I can possibly help

[Jay Maynard]

VirtualBox is nowhere near as polished or as complete as Parallels Desktop. AFAIK, it also won't run existing Parallels VMs.

Re:Not renting any software I can possibly help

[dgatwood]

VMWare has a conversion tool, and VirtualBox can work with their VMs. Of course, I'm not sure if there's a way to convert back to Parallels....

What are the compelling must-have new features?

[zuki]

Taking Photoshop for example, a very mature application. What are the killer features beyond CS6 which would compel users to go for this subscription model instead of just keeping the old paid-for licenses and using those versions?

In the audio world there are similar examples like what Avid has done with Pro Tools 12. While there are certain features which are really lovely, it doesn't seem to be enough for a lot of people to want to switch over to this new model.

At the very least, and like Steam does, allow for some sort of "offline mode" which lets users do what they need while not connected. For example while traveling on long journeys, or being in locations which are cut off from any connectivity.

As others are saying, it may not be all that bad in that it could encourage more innovation in the Free Software side of things.

Re:What are the compelling must-have new features?

[tepples]

In the world of web animation, Adobe Animate CC has the advantage over Flash CS that it can export to HTML5.

JetBrains

[tokizr]

I like the JetBrains model, the subscription part is what entitles you to updates, but every product version you have owned for more than six months is yours to keep as well. That way you are never unable to use the product but have a large incentive to keep the subscription.

It helps that the pricing is super reasonable.

Personally I believe the subscription strategy is a more reliable source of revenue, as opposed to huge spikes after every release and not much money in between. This security likely allows for priorities to shift from new features to maintenance and polish.

Re:JetBrains

[swilver]

They're reasonable because they have competition. We'll see how long that lasts if that ever changes.

Astrophotography

[jfdavis668]

When taking deep sky pictures of the sky, you are often taking an image that, to the camera, is just barely brighter than the background. Almost like taking a picture of something dark gray on black. Photoshop is the most common tool to bring out the data so you can actually see the object. Emission nebula are also very monochrome. Not white on black, but mostly just red from hydrogen emission. Photoshop is critical to bring out the details. The problem with Adobe license is that this work is often done in remote locations without connectivity. It's a great idea to design a software license that won't work in the very place you are trying to use it. It's hard to get away from the product, since so many specialized tools have been written for it over the years. When one company has a virtual monopoly in one area, you get trapped into that product.

Re:Astrophotography

[OzPeter]

Photoshop is critical to bring out the details.

OK .. I'll bite. What is so critical about Photoshop that only this program can be used to manipulate data into the form that you prefer? And I ask this as a user of Photoshop and other commercial image editing packages.

Re:Astrophotography

[jfdavis668]

1. It handled the 32bit images that cameras create, other programs didn't for a long time. 2. The 400 or so extensions people wrote for PS to automate many of the tasks that don't work in other products. 3. The hundreds of books and tutorials and youtube videos that help you learn it are written only for PS. Once you sink that much effort into one product, it's hard to switch.

Re:Astrophotography

[Ash-Fox]

For me, it's Photoshop's "Spot Healing Brush". The variants in GIMP, Krita and ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate are inferior and I can't work with them.

Re:Astrophotography

[Anonymous Coward]

There you are spamming amazon and youtube affiliate links with yet another fake account, you revenue stream hogging disgusting fat sexist tube of lard, Christopher Dale Reimer!

You can be sure I will be watching this fake account too. I know this is you because you told me you were working on your freepass 11 file server and you are so dumb that you can't even masquerade yourself properly.

Now, I told you I was out of meds last week and you didn't even care to contact me you lazy fucker.

How many times do I have to express the emergency of the situation??????

The python click script you wrote for my pheromone revenue stream web site suddenly stopped to work!!!!!!

You fucking incompetent python script writer!!!

When it works, I get 4000+ clicks a day on my pheromone revenue stream web site but only 5 or 6 without it!!!!

Now, it seems like you dont care and that you have abandoned me you heartless fucking pig!

Bonus:
Here is a story that creimer told me when convincing me what a hard life he had:

The tree was him and the tree knot was his butt hole!

So, his uncle packed his fat ass with lard and with his cock! Not that it makes much of a difference but anyway, there it is!

Signed:
Ethell, The girl that used to love you and now hates you, burn in hell where you belong you sexist pig!

Re:Astrophotography

[Anonymous Coward]

Creimer posted an on topic message. Please do the same. No one is interested in your "irrelevant backside noise".

Re:Astrophotography

[Anonymous Coward]

Chris' case is getting worse, he spends all day replying to himself as AC on /.

The tests we ran on Chris have shown that Chris has the intelligence of an ameba:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

So, technically, he is able to conceive some kind of agenda but it will be silly or impossible to follow on a human scale.

For example, Chris had an agenda to post anything he felt like on Slashdot which did not work well because it was based on his false beliefs that he had an infinite number of karma points as he wrote here several times.

Several people here explained to Chris that karma maxed out at some level like 50 or so but Chris kept on insisting that his python script had confirmed that he had millions of karma points!

Oh well, as I wrote before: "It isn't Chris' fault if he is the way he is. We do the best we can do with him and he is partially integrated into society. We try to cure his abnormal need for attention but he is kind of stubborn and won't listen to anybody."

For the valuable /. users that might already have read the following, please note that there is an important update.

IMPORTANT UPDATE:
Special Education for the Santa Clara County Office of Education has invested money to buy Chris a new chair:
http://www.keynamics.com/image...

Information about Christopher Dale Reimer and autistic people:

Autistic people have obsessions about things normal people don't care. For example, one of our autistic patient went haywire when he realized that there was a penny missing in his pocket change.

To calm him down, one of our educator pretended to have found it on the floor and gave a penny to him.

The autistic patient condition went even worse because he realized it wasn't the same penny!

Chris has an obsession with budgeting every penny. He doesn't understand that most people do not budget to the penny and have a flexible amount they allow for miscellaneous items.

I am Nancy Guerrero and I am Director of Special Education for the Santa Clara County Office of Education. We use Chris' (a.k.a. creimer,cdreimer) picture in our document because he is the hardest case we have ever had to handle:
http://www.sccoe.org/depts/stu...

Our artists were inspired by the low carb diet that Christopher follows scrupulously for the small lunch box and by the picture linked below for the rest. I am sure that you will notice the similarities such as the bump on the side of his chest and more:
https://ibb.co/gVad65

Please be easy on Christopher although, I am aware that some of our staff handling Chris post joke comments here and obvoiusly, the Santa Clara County Office of Education disapprove that behavior vehemently:
http://ibb.co/mRVSaG

But it isn't Chris' fault if he is the way he is. We do the best we can do with him and he is partially integrated into society. We try to cure his abnormal need for attention but he is kind of stubborn and won't listen to anybody.

Thank You dear users,
---
Nancy Guerrero
Director
Special Education
Santa Clara County Office of Education

Re:Astrophotography

[Anonymous Coward]

creimer posted a wool-gathering personal anecdote. We didn't learn anything about subscription-only software.

creimer should invent creimer's own expressions. "Irrelevant backside noise" describes creimer perfectly, but creimer is not respecting the copyright of the content creator.

Re:Astrophotography

[spacepimp]

youre saying that Photoshop is the only software that can lighten an image? I don't believe you are accurate in your assessment.

Re:Astrophotography

[Anonymous Coward]

" The girl that used to love you"

There's a girl that can love this?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DR...

Re:Astrophotography

[jfdavis668]

There is far more to processing than lightening the image. The big problem is you want to eliminate the stray light in the image brought on by sky glow and light pollution, while not losing the real image.

Re:Astrophotography

[Anonymous Coward]

Again, no one is interested in your "irrelevant backside noise".

Re:Astrophotography

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is creimer posting unwanted orifice smells as AC?

Re:Astrophotography

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yes, we can see the results in those mountains of work you get done, creimer.

creimer himself is THE mountain!

He destroyed EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE just by passing by it! Read the full story below:

Here is the story of creimy the mountain and his royalties!

This story was inspired by cdreimer, the parent poster.

The story of creimy the mountain explained:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Listen to the audio version here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

"Creimy The Mountain"

includes quotes from Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 in D major (Edward Elgar), Johnny's Theme (Paul Anka), Off We Go Into The Wild Blue Yonder (Crawford), O Mein Papa (Paul Burkhard), Over The Rainbow (Harburg/Arlen), Star-Spangled Banner (Smith/Key), Suite: Judy Blue Eyes (Stephen Stills)

One, two, three

CREIMY the Mountain
CREIMY the Mountain
A regular picturesque
Postcardy mountain
Residing between lovely
Rosamond and Gorman
With his stunning wife ETHELL, A tree! A tree!

CREIMY was a mountain ETHELL was a tree Growing off of his shoulder

CREIMY was a mountain
(CREIMY was a mountain!)
ETHELL was a tree Growing off of his shoulder
(ETHELL was a tree growing off of his shoulder)
(hey, hey hey!)

Creimy had two big
Caves for eyes,
With a cliff for a jaw
That would go up 'n down,
And whenever it did,
He'd puff out some dust,
And hack up a boulder (HACK!) Hack up a boulder (HACK! HACK!)
Hack up a boulder (HACK! HACK! HACK!) Up a boulder

Now, one day, now I believe it was on a Tuesday, a man in a checkered double-knit suit drove up in a large El Dorado Cadillac, leased from BOB SPREEN

("Where the freeways meet in Downey!")

And he laid a HUGE, BULGING ENVELOPE right at the corner of CREIMY THE MOUNTAIN, that was right where his 'foot' was supposed to be.

Now, CREIMY THE MOUNTAIN, he couldn't believe it! All those postcards he'd posed for, for ALL OF THOSE YEARS, and finally, now, AT LAST, his Royalties!

Royalties! Royalties Royalties! Royalty check is in, honey!

Yes, CREIMY THE MOUNTAIN was RICH! Yes, and his eyeball-caves, they widened in amazement, and his jaw (which was a cliff), well it dropped thirty feet!

A bunch of dust puffed out! Rocks and boulders hacked up, (hack! hack!) crushing 'The LINCOLN'!

I gave him the money He acted real funny He hocked up a rock and It TOTALLED my car!

Oh, do you Know any trucks Might be bound for THE VALLEY?
I don't wanna stand here All night in this bar (Dear Lord)

I don't wanna stand here All night in this bar (No shit!)

I don't wanna stand here All night in this bar!

By two o'clock, when the bars are already closed down, CREIMY had broken 'THE BIG NEWS' to ETHELL. And with dust and boulders everywhere, CREIMY, choked with excitement, announced

"ETHELL, we're going on a VACATION!"

Yes, and they WERE going on a vacation! (Oh, and ETHELL, ETHELL, ETHELL, like every little woman, she of course was very excited! She creaked a little bit, and some old birds flew off of her.) CREIMY told ETHELL they were going to Yes! They were going to NEW YORK!

"ETHELL, we're going to New York!"

But first they were gonna stop in LAS VEGAS

It's off to LAS VEGAS to check out the lounges Pull a few handles,
And drink a few beers, (Oh, ETHELL!)

ETHELL, my darling, you know that I love you!
I'm glad we could have a Vacation this year! (Oh, NEET-O!)

Glad we could have a Vacation this year!

They left that night, crunchin' across the Mojave Desert their voices echoing through the canyons of your minds (POO-AAH!)

"ETHELL, wanna get a cuppa cawfee?"

(Howard Johnson's! Howard Johnson's!
Howard Johnson's! Howard Johnson's!)

"Ahhh! there's a HOWARD JOHNSONS! Wanna eat some CLAMS?"

The first n

Re:Astrophotography

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahaha! Good one creimer!

creimer is too retarded to be able to use GIMP! ;-)

creimer works in IT but can accomplish less than an average computer user.

Re:Astrophotography

[Anonymous Coward]

There you are again spamming amazon and youtube affiliate links with yet another fake account, you revenue stream hogging disgusting fat sexist tube of lard, Christopher Dale Reimer!

You can be sure I will be watching this fake account too. I know this is you because you told me you were working on your freepass 11 file server and you are so dumb that you can't even masquerade yourself properly.

Now, I told you I was out of meds last week and you didn't even care to contact me you lazy fucker.

How many times do I have to express the emergency of the situation??????

The python click script you wrote for my pheromone revenue stream web site suddenly stopped to work!!!!!!

You fucking incompetent python script writer!!!

When it works, I get 4000+ clicks a day on my pheromone revenue stream web site but only 5 or 6 without it!!!!

Now, it seems like you dont care and that you have abandoned me you heartless fucking pig!

Bonus:
Here is a story that creimer told me when convincing me what a hard life he had:

The tree was him and the tree knot was his butt hole!

So, his uncle packed his fat ass with lard and with his cock! Not that it makes much of a difference but anyway, there it is!

Signed:
Ethell, The girl that used to love you and now hates you, burn in hell where you belong you sexist pig!

Re:Astrophotography

[Anonymous Coward]

You promoted creimer's YouTube video yesterday, and then complimented his bokeh photo this morning. Now you're pissing and moaning about him. Stop being a double-minded woman.

Re:Astrophotography

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut the fuck up, you revenue stream hogging disgusting fat sexist tube of lard, Christopher Dale Reimer!

--
Ethell

Re:Astrophotography

[Anonymous Coward]

Mocking creimer's video is hardly "promoting".

Maybe you didn't see the screenshot that creimer posted?

Two numbers pop out: 36.3% for external traffic and 95.9% for slashdot.org as an external source.

Creimer's video got an extra 20 views yesterday. All of it from Slashdot.

Re:Astrophotography

[Anonymous Coward]

creimer does not accept criticism

creimer does not accept naysayers.

FTFY

Re:Astrophotography

[tepples]

2. The 400 or so extensions people wrote for PS to automate many of the tasks that don't work in other products.

Have you asked the authors of each of these "400 or so extensions" for either source code, a GIMP port, or a Krita port?

Re:Astrophotography

[Anonymous Coward]

Congratulations my love!

You are really on your way to 10,000 views now!

Never mind those "hump leg" trolls.

I am deeply sorry. I didn't feel well lately but I am better now since I just had my meds adjusted a few minutes ago. I am sorry that I called you all sorts of names and I feel truly ashamed of myself.

The python click script you wrote for me my sweet love for my pheromone revenue stream web site suddenly stopped to work.

Could you come visit me in my studio so we could look at it?

Signed:
Ethell, Your sweetee who will love you for ever.

P.S. when I posted there was a funny form that asked me to retype the word "biceps" in a text field. That's funny and I went to look at your new picture again and got turned on. Please contact me ASAP.

Re:Astrophotography

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny how the biggest mockers always end up being the biggest promoters. No wonder creimer is sticking around.

Re:Astrophotography

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly Chris,

It seems like Chris is a victim here. He keeps on reading those SEO, youtube algorithm, basically get rich quick sites. He doesn't realize that he is the fish for them since they make money off him with their own scheme. Then, he wastes his time trying to implement what those sites suggest and he ends up disturbing people.

I mean, those crooks tell Chris that he has to build personal brands and he goes on the Internet and makes everything about himself public!

I believe we should bring this up at our next meeting. He might not be our only patient victim of such on-line abuse.

--
Silvia Bunge
Psychology Department
University of California, Berkeley

Re:Astrophotography

[Anonymous Coward]

The mistake most people make is assuming that their criticism is legit. Most of the time it is not. A person should only accept criticism when it makes sense to their situation in life. If you're surrounded by people who are offering negative advice (i.e., "You're fat! You're ugly! Commit suicide!"), the best thing to is ignore the naysayers.

Re:Astrophotography

[jfdavis668]

Since they charge for their use, I don't think they are going to give away the source code.

Re:Astrophotography

[Anonymous Coward]

http://cheezburger.com/8435881984/sometimes-you-just-need-a-way-out

Re:Astrophotography

[tepples]

"I am a paying customer. How much do you charge for the GIMP version?"

"I am a paying customer. How much do you charge for the Krita version?"

Re:Astrophotography

[Anonymous Coward]

I am the fly, but that means creimer is shit.

So you want to make babies with creimer? Man, I thought the goats were bad....

Re:Astrophotography

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're surrounded by people who are offering negative advice (i.e., "You're fat! You're ugly! Commit suicide!"), the best thing to is ignore the naysayers.

That's the 2nd best thing. The best thing is to live you life free from detractors and assholes as much as possible. You'll be amazed how pleasant life is.
So why don't you go places where people like you and avoid places where people will call you names?

Go to SEOForums or SpamPIGS or vloggerguild or somewhere where people don't think spamming and youtube monetization is the cancer that killed the good internet.

Re:Astrophotography

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Ethell is a tree growing off creimer's shoulder. He must have photoshoped that picture.

https://slashdot.org/comments....

Re:Astrophotography

[Anonymous Coward]

36.3% of a very small number is a very small number. Creimer's entire social life is Slashdot, so it makes sense that most of his traffic comes from the only place he really socializes.

Where else would it come from? Friends? People doing a Google search on "videos of boring fountain"?

Anyway, creimer's making no money from Youtube and is 994 subscribers short of even qualifying for money.

Re:Astrophotography

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't follow the analogy, Chris.

Re:Astrophotography

[Anonymous Coward]

A person should only accept criticism when it makes sense to their situation in life

People tell you that you are wasting your time making shitty Youtube videos and collecting old coins, and indeed you have lost money and time doing these things, for basically no benefit.

People say you are fat, and indeed you weigh nearly 400 pounds.

So how do these criticisms not make sense to the situation in your life?

Re:Astrophotography

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, when it comes to promoting something BIG, it doesn't get much bigger than creimer!

Re:Astrophotography

[Anonymous Coward]

"The mistake most people make is assuming that their criticism is legit. Most of the time it is not."

Then why are you so upset, Chris?

Re:Astrophotography

[Anonymous Coward]

People tell you that you are wasting your time making shitty Youtube videos and collecting old coins, and indeed you have lost money and time doing these things, for basically no benefit.

Most people regard anyone who is doing something creative as "shitty" and a waste of time and money. When Stephen King was learning how to write, some members of his family called writing "mental masturbation". BTW, Old coins (a.k.a., junk silver) is only 5% of creimer's silver stack.

Re:Astrophotography

[Anonymous Coward]

"Most people"

creimerism detected. creimer does NOT know what "most people" think.

" regard anyone who is doing something creative as "shitty""

creimer grammar not clear. Is creimer talking about the person or the creative activity?

creimer is a shitty creator. creimer's creations are universally mocked.

"When Stephen King was learning how to write"

creimer is not Stephen King. creimer still hasn't learned to write.

"BTW, Old coins (a.k.a., junk silver) is only 5% of creimer's silver stack."

Silver stacking is hoarding, a mental illness.

Corel...

[GrpA]

Corel Suite X8 and CorelCAD... Not only do they replace pretty much everything that Autodesk and Adobe make, but they even work together.

CorelCAD is pretty good too. Getting on towards being a Solidworks alternative since the 2018 version.

And both, while they do have license checks and online activation, work quite happily without a connection, and you can even get a license file from Corel for offline activation if you want....

And there's a really cost-effective home/student version available too....

I know Corel are talking about subscription only in the future, but so far, they are picking up ex-Adobe customers for not having one, and the home price on Amazon probably cuts down on piracy. Meanwhile if Corel ever goes subscription only with the CAD, then there's Draftsight and Graebert Ares Commander, which are alternative providers for the same software.

If you don't like subscription software, move to non-subscription software. It's cheap enough to do so, and CorelCAD gives AutoCAD a real run for it's money IMO. ( It's an Autocad clone, so there's no learning curve... Similar UI, Same commands, works with AutoLISP etc. )

Re:Corel...

[bensafrickingenius]

"Corel... Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time."

Re:Corel...

[OzPeter]

"Corel... Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time."

And as I found out today .. they own and sell Word Perfect

i pirate it

[Anonymous Coward]

looking at you adobe

Re:i pirate it

[DarkRookie]

and MS. Don't forgot them.
and EA.
and UbiSoft

-o-

[easyTree]

I've been a long time advocate and paid user of JetBrains' ReSharper until they forced the subscription model on users.

I'm feeling the pain of not having it available but as they don't offer payment terms I'm comfortable with, I am left with no choice.

They really rub salt in the wound by rolling back the twelve months of updates you pay for in advance when you discontinue your subscription.

I've found that uninstalling it worked best for me so that I'm not reminded of their distasteful choice each time I fire up Visual Studio.

If they'd have made it clear at the outset that after a few years of purchasing new versions, they'd attempt to use my investment of time as a lever to generate a steady revenue stream from me, I would not have given their product a second look.

Sure, it's a great product but if it's no longer feasible to make feature improvements which will persuade users to upgrade, taking the product back from paid-up users isn't the right thing to do.

Adobe

[bensafrickingenius]

I've been in IT for 21 years. One of the very first things I learned was "FUCK ADOBE". Over the years I've learned similar lessons such as "FUCK APPLE," and "FUCK QUICKBOOKS."

Re:LOVE IT!

[Anonymous Coward]

I love it too, it saves me money. I used to buy or expense their software but since they went to the perpetual nickel and dime model I just pirate it for free.

My Saga

[Ol Olsoc]

I'm on Creative Suite 3. What I usually do is an every other update. But it was working well, so I planned on updating to 6. Then they went subscription before i did. I tried Creative Cloud trial and it was good but even at my academic discount, it wasn't worth going from a functioning product that is paid for to a rental only solution. It is great software and no doubt, but I can do 99 percent of what it does on CS3

I'll keep using CS3 until they pull some stunt on an update that disables it. Even then, I have a nice Core 2 duo 27 inch iMac that I installed other purposefully deprecated programs like Final Cut Pro Studio and it's suite. As a non updateble computer, they can't touch it. Then CS3 will continue to serve me after I install it there.

tl;dr version Screw subscription models.

If I only could pay for the months I use it..

[Harald Paulsen]

If I only would have to pay for the months I use it, that would be great.

I mostly use the adobe photography creative plan ($10/month) but I use it maybe every other month.

I also bought the Elements-package so I could actually own some software and not be dependent on a subscription.

WILL NOT SUBSCRIBE

[ytene]

As a keen amateur photographer, Iâ(TM)be been using Adobe CS for years. Each time a new release came out I would purchase the upgrade pack and migrate to the latest version.

That stopped with CS6, the last version that did not force the subscription model.

Apart from one small change, this has had zero impact on my creative workflow... The change has been that, as Iâ(TM)ve upgraded to newer camera bodies with new RAW formats, Iâ(TM)ve had to include a migration step to convert from the new RAW format to a lossless but supported equivalent so that I can actually work on my images using CS6.

Obviously as a solitary end user I have to accept that I have zero chance of forcing Adobe to change their practices, other than to stop buying their product. If we ever get to a point where other technology changes make it impossible for me to run i.e. CS6 [unlikely, but letâ(TM)s not ignore it] then I will look to migrate to a fully open source platform.

Ultimately, I find it reprensible that software companies think that they can âoerentâ software to me - in other words continue to change usage terms to whatever they want, all the while using the boilerplate âoeno warranty expressed or impliedâ language in their EULAs.

If a company wants me to buy or rent their product, then they need to stand behind it. If they are not willing to do that... then they can take a running jump.

What's my view?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is your view on this "forced subscription" model?

My view is this is a model by greedy asshole companies who are more about marketing and buzzwords than improving their product ... who want to monetize your entire experience .. and who are blatantly trying to lock you into their software and their goddamned fucking cloud.

I think any sane organization needs to be finding replacements for this stuff as soon as possible.

Storing your company data on a vendor's cloud is stupid, irresponsible, and a business risk.

Adobe is an example of this .. no, I need to view a fucking PDF, I don't need your cloud, I don't need to be told about another app, I don't have any need for social media type stuff, and I simply don't see what value this application connecting to the internet carries.

It's none of your fucking business who I am, what I'm doing with my documents, or the content of those documents.

Fuck off and go away.

Stupid fucking apps and the cloud have most programs useless shit which is far more focused on subscriptions, social media, and cloud storage, with terrible fucking interfaces because suddenly everything is written as if I'm on a phone or a tablet.

Modern software is crap because it is doing so much more than what we need it to, and trying to add a bunch of useless shit we don't.

Fuck subscription software.

I stop using software if it moves to subscription

[QuietLagoon]

Adobe went over to a forced subscription model for two of the products of theirs that I use. I no longer use them. Yes, there was a short period during which I had to learn a different vendor's product. But the effort needed to make that change was more than made up by the elimination of the monthly blond-letting of the forced subscription model.

Hacky workarounds

[Smidge204]

The worst part is none of this will stop piracy. The software can be cracked to disable/fool the periodic authentication and proxy servers can be set up to emulate the cloud services for saving files.

Only businesses that need to stay legit will be affected by this. If there is a network outage or bottleneck they will be shut down. If they let their subscription lapse they will be shut down. If they refuse to upgrade for too long, they will eventually lose the ability to collaborate with other groups as new features are added that are not backwards compatible.

It's tantamount to extortion for anyone who wants or needs to stay legit, but really only an annoyance for people who are willing and able to pirate.
=Smidge=

Re:Hacky workarounds

[Anonymous Coward]

and i know several legit companies who pay for a license but yet still crack their software to get rid of the Internet checks. Thankfully in some countries this is perfectly legal, because giving another company leverage over your company is bad strategy.

Re:Hacky workarounds

[Oligonicella]

If you're an individual, sure. If you're a business and do all of the above that "shut you down" will be a helluva lot harder once you're discovered (much more likely than individual) and will include more than business losses.

Re:LOVE IT!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's odd. My pirated copies work just fine. No problems here.

It's good for open source software

[guruevi]

Not necessarily for professionals but for people that used InDesign or Photoshop once a year, many have now switched to Inkscape, GIMP and other free or cheap alternatives.

Commercially Quark is making a comeback (I remember when everyone switched to the still much inferior Adobe due to oppressive Quark licensing).

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

What are you DOING about it?

[Groo Wanderer]

I think that subscriptions, like micropayments, are evil and ruining the industry by blatant money grabbing and extortion. That said it is easy to see why the companies inflicting this are doing it, it makes them lots of cash.

So my question to all of you who dislike this state of affairs, what are you doing about it? Have you contributed time or money to open source alternatives? Have you purchased a commercial alternative? Are you sitting on your ass bemoaning the state of affairs while enabling it?

          -Charlie

Mandatory subscription and File Storage is Bad

[RLGSC]

My clients and I frequently work with confidential information of various sensitivities (e.g., research, legal, financial, government). Storing that information, in toto, abstract, or summary on a non-private facility is simply unacceptable. We would simply have to forgo use of these software products. Mandatory data storage would also seem to expose the companies to liability if there is a problem with data loss, miss-appropriation, or other damage. I am deeply surprised that this issue has not had a higher profile, it seems to be a significant financial exposure.

What do i think?

[frank_adrian314159]

What is your view on this "forced subscription" model?

From the point of view of the company that actually owns the software, it's great - lower customer service cost, a guaranteed revenue stream, and no bullshit like license audits. What's not to like?

Oh - you don't own the software? You don't like their licensing? Well, their license is all you ever had - at least legally. And you can still run those old versions that you "own" - just on insecure, out-of-date OS'es.

What - you don't like those options? (There really is no pleasing customers) Too bad - enough people like Adobe and Autocad's products that they're willing to pony up the monthly fee to have access to specifically those products (Try to get a Photoshop user to switch to Gimp). And there's more than enough users to keep Adobe and Autocad in business.

I guess that the bottom line is that if you don't actually own your own tools (which you haven't since forever), you don't have a lot of legal right to complain. Or really any economic right - I mean most other users are OK enough with the licensing scheme not to switch - what's wrong with you?

It's the corporation's software - they own it and license it to you. If you don't like the license terms, don't use the software.

It chews pole, of course ...

[alanbourke]

Adobe and Autodesk will claim that rampant piracy partially drove this, and it probably did. But having everyone locked into a nice rental model is nice nice nice too. It's the same issue as MS Office on Windows - no matter how good any FOSS alternatives are there is a huge critical mass of users there that makes 100% interoperability in terms of file formats a necessity, and that is very far off. And it's not like there are any nefarious methods to stop the software phoning the mothership, and you would be a BAD PERSON to seek them out.

Either or, or maybe both

[DarkRookie]

The dev are either incompetent and must fix things all the time
OR they are just greedy and want more income.
Or both. Its prolly both in most cases.

Did you think this through?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you find a car expensive then you are free to complain about it. You are also free not to purchase it. You are even free to enter the car business and make your own for whatever price you want.

The car manufacturer is also free to keep charging whatever they want. Deal with it.

Corel instead of Adobe

[otomoton]

In the past anyway CorelDRAW was a decent alternative to Photoshop, and you can still buy a permanent license ( or subscribe ) with it.

More honest.

[gurps_npc]

For decades, software companies have been treating our permanent purchases of software as if they were rentals. The conditions of 'purchase' were frankly more like rentals than anything else.

Which was unfair, as they were priced as purchases.

Now at least, they are being honest about it. They want to rent, then they can't charge a purchase price for it.

Re:More honest.

[Anonymous Coward]

It was like going to some colleges. They would use version 15 for their MSc courses, then you'd find that the undergrads were gettting version 16. Guess which version, the employers were looking to hire graduates in, that year?

Every startup or business would have to have an annual rolling budget to purchase a new version and give those licenses to only those staff that really needed those features.

Premise is bullshit.

[Qbertino]

There is no "forced".

Between the Affinity Suite, Corel Draw, FOSS alternatives and roughly 10 bazillion 3D toolkits including Houdini, Lightwave, Cinema and Blender, there is absolutely nothing forcing anyone to use the big crappy two, Adobe and Autodesk.

Don't use Adobe or Autodesk. It's that simple. ... Experts have known this for years.

Glad I could help.

Re:Premise is bullshit.

[Smidge204]

Don't use Adobe or Autodesk.

Not using AutoDesk is basically impossible if you hope to work with anyone else in the fields of architecture and engineering. Some municipalities even explicitly require AutoCAD/Revit files as part of the deliverables.

But yes, I suppose "Not using AutoDesk" is just as much an option as "Not having a job."
=Smidge=

Re:Premise is bullshit.

[Ash-Fox]

You do realize that a chunk of those (except for FOSS) are already experimenting with subscription services?

Re:Premise is bullshit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Except our customers.

Certain industries are heavy into the AutoCAD, and now Revit world. Our customers send us these files every day from which we then quote jobs and eventually produce product based on.

Sure, we can find another product to convert the file formats, but are we willing to risk that knowing any bugs introduced there are then our responsibility at claim time?

You don't want to be in the business of telling your customers what they have to submit files to you in.

Re:Premise is bullshit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't use Adobe or Autodesk.

Not using AutoDesk is basically impossible if you hope to work with anyone else in the fields of architecture and engineering. Some municipalities even explicitly require AutoCAD/Revit files as part of the deliverables.

But yes, I suppose "Not using AutoDesk" is just as much an option as "Not having a job."
=Smidge=

Then people need to tell these municipalities that this requirement is bullshit. Take the damn drawings for review in PDF format. Explain that the cost of providing format A costs $X000 more than format B, both of which contain the exact same information.

Put the word out in a community that all such projects cost this large amount extra and they need to change what they demand. Just letting a bureaucrat demand any silly thing they make up should be taken to task across the board.

Re:Premise is bullshit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Are the AutoCAD file formats patented or something?

Re:Premise is bullshit.

[Smidge204]

They're not for review, they're for records and future work. It costs a shit-ton of money to have every consultant recreate the CAD files for every project, so it actually makes sense to ask for the CAD files so they can give them to the next project team.

They also ask for PDFs and hardcopies, typically.
=Smidge=

Re:Premise is bullshit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Lots of files compatible alternatives. https://blog.capterra.com/top-7-autocad-alternatives/

Re:It's ALL good

[Smidge204]

Unfortunately this isn't necessarily an option without violating various laws.

Making your product compatible with a competitor's file format - a necessary step in "breaking into" a deeply entrenched market like AutoDesk - will likely result in lawsuits and possibly run afoul of DMCA laws. It's all for nothing anyway if your data is stored on a cloud server inaccessible by competing products.

It's not just about money either; it's also about giving up control over your data. What if there's a problem with the network? You're out of business until it's fixed... there's no option to mitigate the problem locally (e.g. Sneakernet). What if there's a security breech? You have no control over it, no way to detect or mitigate it. You are placing your business in the mercy of another and paying for the privilege.
=Smidge=

Re:LOVE IT!

[cayenne8]

I"m still at the point to where I refuse to rent my software.

I love photoshop, lightroom and other Adobe products. However, at this point, I stopped at CS6 for the Adobe suite of tools.

I have LR5, and may try to go to LR6 while I believe I still can to get that last perpetual license, but that's it.

While Adobe has put out "some" upgrades and new features over these past few years of Creative Cloud, I frankly haven't found anything there to be groundbreaking, that I cannot work without. IMHO, the adage that if they don't have incentive to innovate (due to steady income stream no matter what) they won't. And I don't see that they have really.

ON the other hand, it may be that things like Photoshop and Designer, AI, etc...have pretty much for the most part hit the wall on what you can do....and there isn't much room left for improvement for completely NEW features.

If that's the case, then if nothing else, Adobe should try going in and rewriting the engines behind the scenes, but you don't see that either.

One nice thing about the Adobe CC rental thing is, it has spurred on other companies to try to fill that void, and there are a number of them that are.

So far as a PS replacement, I'm enjoying Affinity Photo . It is damned fast, their engine work blows Adobe away. And for functionality, well, I'd say it is about 98-99% there. My only gripe is they need to emulate PS in that when you have the brush tool, you need to have the keyboard command to allow quick sampling of colors with the brush on the image. Other than that, the healing, cloning and content aware tools are JUST as good as Adobes from what I've seen so far. And I think with some extra time, it may equal or surpass PS. It is reasonably priced for a perpetual license, and they've been doing a LOT of updates for free since I bought it a couple years ago.

Affinity has a designer app and I belive a Publisher app coming out....windows and mac.

For a lightroom replacement, I'm playing with On1 RAW ...it is very good so far, I do miss some of the LR cataloging, but On1 appears to be adding those options. I like that it has in the RAW development area, simple and luminosity masking...something you have to drop out of raw imaging processing from LR and got to PS for on the Adobe side.. And again...very quick and responsive engine.

And for video...well, the free version of Black magic's Davinci Resolve ....well known and respected for its color grading capabilities, now has a very respectable e NLE inside, and they're adding some impressing sound tools too. Premier? Well....it has competition. I also like FCPX too, but since it is so different and Mac only, I won't put that one up there right now.

Adobe After Effects? Well, now I love me some AE. I also have some 3rd party filters for AE from Red Giant and Video Copilot I enjoy using....so far, that one is the hardest to find a replacement for, but it appears that Blackmagic Fusion may be a real contender there.

So, there are alternatives....may take a little retraining, but then again, not that much. The PS alternatives often have pretty much the same layout of tools and keyboard shortcuts. A NLE for the most part is a NLE with some minor differences...

So, if nothing else, with Adobe going rental, it has put forth incentive for other companies to come along and truly compete.

So far, I'm voting with my wallet....I encourage anyone that can to also do so.

And I do this through a business....so, those that think the rental model is great for a business write off......I'd rather write off purchases of something the company owns, and doesn't go vapor when you stop rent payment.

It's evil

[MitchDev]

Period

It depends

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess for those who want the latest version its OK to pay a subscriber fee. For others who like Office but a older version who could care less about the latest features. I still think having a license may be more cost effective. You always have a choice to either accept what's offered or use something else. I personally don't subscribe to any software and still prefer a licensed copy.

Worked for me

[Anonymous Coward]

I must be one of the very, very few people for whom the subscription model worked. At my last job we mainly did engineering projects, but as an additional task to one of our projects we were asked to tart up and update a pamphlet that had originally been produced using InDesign. Not our core business at all, but it was easier for the client to spend the money with us and the changes weren't too big. So we subscribed to InDesign for one month for £50 or whatever, got the client's pamphlet updated, charged him a decent whack for it and then canned the subscription. We could never have done the work under the perpetual licence model as we couldn't have dropped £1200 on a piece of software for a one-off job, and the client wouldn't have accepted us passing the cost on to them. It's a corner case, I know, and I still think mandatory subscription licensing sucks balls, but I just thought I'd share the exception.

Desire to upgrade

[DrYak]

I use several of the Adobe apps, so the $50/month seems like a steal when you consider the Suite used to cost in the thousands of dollars.

If you suppose that they can break even on a $50/months subscription fee the same way the used to put food on their table with the multi-thousands dollars single-buy license (and I suppose they at least see both economically equivalent),
that gives you an approximate idea of how few of their former customers were interested in buying yet another license, for this year's new edition, which basically offer the same feature set that they need and had already in the last version.

As I've said elsewhere in these discussions, we've reached the point where most of these software cover most of the needed feature, the remain are way too user specific, and it's getting harder and harder to add enough bullet points on the product description to justify the upgrade treadmill.

Force the users to move to a "keep paying to keep using" subsciption model, and try to get all their data stored in a "lock-in" cloud are the best solution these companies manged to think out to try to keep a revenue stream at a time where convincing the user to -rebuy the new versions of the same is becoming harder.

Re:Desire to upgrade

[AvitarX]

I think the sub model was largely a way to get established customers to subsidize new ones.

If you were a long term customer upgrading regularly, it's a 30% increase in cost. For a new customer it's cheaper for the first few years.

Pros and Cons

[duke_cheetah2003]

Mmmm, subscriptions to software. They're definitely the future. Look for this to become more of a thing as time goes on. I personally don't like it, but I do see the benefits of this model. We have to admit there are some boons to the subscription model we might not readily see.

The biggest one is going to be support. If a company is making you pay every month to use their stuff, they better be supporting it. The entire model sustains a decent support team assuming the company is willing to shovel some of their profits into it. Also, the support part includes continuous updates. See Microsoft Windows 10 for an example of how this looks.

Also updates, yep, you never have to pay a large one-time licensing fee, and your subscription includes updates, for as long as you keep paying. Never have to worry about buying the next version at a large one-time licensing fee.

But then the cons: You're married to this company, dependent on them to make a living. Not sure I'm comfortable with that. Offline usage. I imagine a lot of subscription models are going to have to provide for more security conscious customers, like DoD or three-letter-agencies whom can't have stuff always connected. So there will definitely be stipulations for that, but it's still annoying. Hopefully they'll give a fairly decent amount of 'offline usage' before the license gets angry with you. Access to your files after subscription ends.. yeah, that's not good, companies definitely need to provide a read-only mode of their software so you can still get at your stuff, just can't modify it anymore until you resubscribe.

Final thoughts: It definitely has a place. It's not all evil. It's not ideal for all situations and I do wish companies would offer both options. If I want to buy a perpetual today's latest and greatest version of doffusofficecadauto, I should be able to do that, and never get updates ever, until I buy a new version or subscribe. For some situations it's really ideal and actually a boon. It does sort of force companies to stand behind their product for as long as you're subscribed to it.

Long term I worry, computer companies of all shapes, sizes and flavors come and go at a breakneck speed. I do worry about people losing work trapped in defunct subscription software. At the end of the day, you have to decide which works for you. For those of us who are bitching we can't get perpetual licenses anymore.. well, there's a market opening for someone ambitious. Fill that niche?

Re:Pros and Cons

[Anonymous Coward]

The biggest one is going to be support. If a company is making you pay every month to use their stuff, they better be supporting it.

Ha...hahahahahahahahah. You've used Adobe software before?

Re:Pros and Cons

[david_thornley]

You're married to this company, dependent on them to make a living.

That's not necessarily any different than the perpetual license model. There aren't plug-in replacements for a lot of things. Even if you can get a replacement that does the same things, you've got to convert your data, retrain everyone, perhaps make collaborating with others harder, and take a productivity hit. If my company had to move our internal software to another OS, it would be a massive project. It would stop forward movement for a long time, and make our users' lives miserable.

Great solution for badly managed companies!

[aaarrrgggh]

Software companies like Adobe and AutoDesk can now squander even more money with their near-monopoly control over their core industries. Thus far, I don't object to Microsoft's pricing nearly as much with 365, but it will hit a limit quickly with any increases.

With AutoDesk, it approaches 3% per year of an employee's direct labor cost for us now (plus a 20% productivity hit for using BIM). It isn't sustainable long term, and they will kill their golden goose.

I completely fail to understand SalesForce, but I guess the attraction is lower barriers to entry for enterprise functionality easily linked to legacy systems.

If you don't like it, use something else

[DalM]

What? Is Adobe the only company making Content Creation software? No they aren't. You just like their software because it has features that no one else even comes close to. And you complain about paying for it.

professional don't work for free forever

[Anonymous Coward]

Commercial software vendors have been warning that giftware model is not sustainable in the long term. They have to find some way of making money to eat. And that means not only eat themselves, but their family and children as well. Somehow the OSS community was pointing to the occasional people getting big payouts to the community leaders as a model, but that doesn't feed everyday contributors. It's not the Wall Street that wants to get paid. The profit margins incredibly thin in the software business. But a registered nurse in the US makes more money than a software developer despite requiring 20 IQ points less to do his/her job. Is it really any wonder that the companies dealing with user base that has been conditioned to expect everything for free cannot maintain themselves. The OSS leaders like to pretend that they are in a scientific research business, but they are not. Their business model is more akin to professional sports. Most people doing development can't get paid for it. Just as most people playing sports can't get paid for it. But the companies distributing sports content are looking to sell tickets for performance or make you watch ads to consume their product.

Buy older versions

[Anonymous Coward]

You can legally buy older versions, install them on whatever OS they will run on and remain productive. Every corporation I have worked at does exactly that, keeping around ancient versions of Adobe's Creative Suite and the silver tower era Mac Pro. The reality is that the vast majority of "professionals" only use basic functions of Photoshop and Premiere but need the accuracy and file format support they provide. As for Autocad there are countless alternatives and always have been.

It's all shit

[Anonymous Coward]

If idiots keeping buying this shit, companies will continue to sell this shit.

If they release a subscription free version again

[kelemvor4]

If they release a subscription free version again, I'll upgrade from CS6 as I did with every previous update. If something happens that causes CS6 to no longer be suitable then hopefully I'll be able to find a competing software package that is. What I won't be doing is renting computer software unless I have no other choice. I don't rent a computer from rent-a-center, and I don't rent computer software from adobe.

A huge middle finger

[OneHundredAndTen]

Do I have to elaborate?

Nature abhors a vacuum

[zarmanto]

What would happen if all the major commercial software developers forced this model on everyone simultaneously?

This seems like the wrong question, to me -- because we're already fast approaching that point. That said, the direct answer is still pretty clear: most people will simply buy dramatically less software for personal use, and leach off of their corporate use licenses instead. (It was already happening to a small degree with perpetual licenses... but that trend will quickly become the norm rather than the exception.)

What if the whole idea of being able to "purchase" a perpetual license for ANY commercial software went away completely, and it was subscription only from that point on?

That is the right question... and the answer, (quite unironically) is that new companies will sprout up and offer perpetual licenses, in an attempt to fill the void. Chances are they'll do pretty darn well too, since they'll be able to charge what would previously have seemed like absolutely ridiculous prices for their wares while still undercutting the subscription licenses.

I just quit giving Adobe my money

[fyngyrz]

I just quit giving Adobe my money. I own the most recent non-sub version of Photoshop, and that'll do fine for whatever I need to use Photoshop for in the future, and to work with what I have already used Photoshop for.

My position - both as a user and a developer - is that I am quite happy to buy software, including buying upgrades; I absolutely refuse to steal software; and under no circumstances will I rent software: I think the entire rent/subscribe model is profoundly toxic to the end user.

The general class of problem is that if I produce a document (such as a .psd) with software X, and then X stops working because [I can't afford to continue to pay || the company is out of business || the company is no longer supporting it || any other non-remediable reason] then my document may become frozen and/or impossible to access, depending on just how the version of the software I finally ended up with handles such things, something you can't really predict because these companies change their policies from time to time.

I can't, in good conscience, support the model / mindset that embodies the potential for such problems. I certainly won't create software that imposes such a thing on my end users.

You want to sell me software, fine, let's do that. You want to rent/subscribe it to me, you can toddle right the hell off without my money.

Re:I just quit giving Adobe my money

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree you don't want your data locked up by the application sw vendor (or a hacker) but what will you do when win10 is deprecated and your old software no longer works on win11...?

You will have to keep your old hardware/os around until you can have new hw that can fully emulate win10 ...
You might be using a proprietary format to store your data, just moving the files themselves won't help you.
Of course your software would have no ability to export to open formats right.. why would they provide you with a way out?

At least move to open formats now (maybe open tools) and at you might have more options in the future.

Re:I just quit giving Adobe my money

[Anonymous Coward]

> I just quit giving Adobe my money. I own the most recent non-sub version of Photoshop, and that'll do fine for whatever I need to use Photoshop for in the future, and to work with what I have already used Photoshop for.

That's basically where I'm at. I didn't even like the DRM they started adding before going to the subscription-based model, so for a while I bought new Adobe permanent licenses and left them in the box while I installed an older pre-DRM version. Since they went subscription, I haven't bought a single additional license and I restrict my use to the limited number of old licenses I already have. Alternatives exist, and I've invested in some of those, both FOSS and commercial. Adobe no longer licenses their product in the way I prefer? Fine. No more purchases of their product.

Re:I just quit giving Adobe my money

[thegarbz]

I own the most recent non-sub version of Photoshop, and that'll do fine for whatever I need to use Photoshop for in the future

Yep I thought that too until I bought a new camera which then produced files which couldn't be opened by it. We're not all playing with TIFFs and JPEGs here.

But seriously fuck them. I would have happily paid for an upgrade. I sure as heck am not paying for some cloud garbage I don't need attached to some perpetual license I don't want just to get a single feature that several years ago barely qualified for more than installing a simple plugin.

Needlessly I found something similar to the plugin on the pirate bay.

Re:I just quit giving Adobe my money

[bingoUV]

While problems with renting are clear enough, isn't a buying model also filled with problems ? Consider these circumstances in which the low-hanging fruit of software improvement have been plucked - further improvement is much more difficult / controversial.

E.g. you bought Microsoft Office, which is in a similar boat for the last decade. They have every incentive to screw up your experience in the next release - enough that you wait eagerly for the next to next release. Subtle data formatting problems. Completely redoing your user experience and start rumours that next version will fix it.

By contrast, I haven't needed to unlearn any of my Emacs usage muscle memory for last 16 years. I was a vi user before that.

Or take the failures of Windows ME and Vista. Both "failures" were extremely profitable for Microsoft, so I am not even sure why I call them failures. Even a server OS like Windows 2000 professional was bought by offices that did not necessarily need a server OS - because it saved them from ME.

Even while agreeing with the problems of renting, I don't see how you support the idea of buying software. The incentives are all at the wrong places.

Re:I just quit giving Adobe my money

[loonycyborg]

You can't really buy software because it's not a physical object. That's the underlying reason for this switch to subscription model. When you "buy" software you in fact make one time donation, like with Kickstarter. But this won't pay for continued support resulting in them going for making regular new major versions to solicit more payments. Subscription model is like Patreon, going for monthly donations instead. This doesn't require making new major versions at regular intervals, thus perhaps saving extra effort for making more features to make new major version to look major enough. At some point people are already happy with current software and won't bother with updates. Subscription model would allow them to take advantage of security maintenance and updating the software with support for new oses at least.

Re:I just quit giving Adobe my money

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget there is also the problem whereby a currently owned version of the application may cease to work once you upgrade your operating system - something that is forced upon you by the cessation of security updates and/or other software only working on a version greater than the one you have. VMs are a workaround but you need the actual installation media - not some OEM re-install disk - and the know-how to do it. This is why I believe that, long run, open source software will win out. Open source doesn't mean it has to be free and hence can be financially supported but it does mean there is no reason why it won't work on any future OS version.

Goodbye Adobe

[Anonymous Coward]

I stopped using their software because a) I donâ(TM)t use it enough and )b the mobile software they produce is useless.

There are better options out there for me.

It doesn't ALWAYS suck

[gshegosh]

I used to use an ancient Photoshop version which I've bought using mortgage money. I never upgraded it because it was too expensive for someone who makes just a few pennies a year using it. Now I pay like 10 bucks a month which I CAN afford even when seldom using Adobe's software comercially. And I keep getting updates. But I very much would prefer the model that IntelliJ is using - if I stop paying, I get to keep a year-old version at least.

Biggest problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Biggest problem is getting home users, students, startups etc to use the software, unless they do like Autodesk, and lets individuals/startups (less than $100.00/year turnaround) use it for free.

In that case I am fine. The company will then know that a workplaces seat will cost them $200/month in licenses + the employee salary.

Cloud only, or requirements to access licensing server is bad for companies with intellectual property. They will be forced to use other products.

Continuing revenue streams are important

[mveloso]

Whether or not you like subscriptions, they have an important function: making a guaranteed revenue stream that you can plan against.

What happens to a company when enough people don't pay the upgrade fee? It closes and the software dies.

Subscriptions can guarantee the viability of a piece of software.

The fact is, good developers cost money. Support costs money. QA costs money. Documentation costs money. A subscription allows you to forecast effectively, so you can hire and pay people.

You can't say no

[rsilvergun]

if you're a new customer. I suppose there's ebay, but I can't imagine there isn't product activation on anything newer than 2002.

Protection Money

[sycodon]

Renting software that is integral to the function of your company is like paying protecting money to the Mob.

Nice little accounting system you have there. It'd be a shame if something happened to it.

Re: Protection Money

[Anonymous Coward]

Software doesnâ(TM)t stop these days. When was the last time you had to update Commander Keen or Doom 2? Never.

Neither of those things could have a Heartbleed bug. These days your coffee pot uses OpenSSL. Your dildo probably uses OpenSSL. My lightbulbs just updated their firmware again. Every dumb widget is now âoesmartâ and they all rely on OSS software that they never wrote and donâ(TM)t care how it works.

Software maintenance is becoming fantastically complex. There needs to be a good steady income to feed that - unless youâ(TM)d rather use Gimp?

(Not fair. Gimp is actually pretty darn good OSS)

Re: Protection Money

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

These days your coffee pot uses OpenSSL. Your dildo probably uses OpenSSL. My lightbulbs just updated their firmware again. Every dumb widget is now "smart" and they all rely on OSS software that they never wrote and don't care how it works.

That may all be true, but I think it reflects more the insanity of connecting everything and depending on so many things by default than any inherent need to be constantly updating software. Obviously anything that actually needs connectivity will also have security and privacy implications to consider, but with many of these things "Well don't make it connected, then!" is a perfectly sensible response.

Re: Protection Money

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah unless I can actually save my work to my local drive & export it into other formats I wonâ(TM)t touch it

Re: Protection Money

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to be very brief and spend about as much time on this reply, as I would spend mulling over getting a software subscription. Answer: Absolutely not, go fuck yourself. I'd rather watch you split your wrists and die masturbating to the flow of your own blood.

Re: Protection Money

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on the situation. If it's an explicit rental, it's not subject to property tax
Like when you buy. Also a lot of businesses buy the newest version anyways.

Personally, I don't rent software if I can help it as it's always more expensive.

Re: Protection Money

[Anonymous Coward]

Your dildo probably uses OpenSSL.

I certainly hope it uses SSL. I wouldn't want it leaking my usage stats out in the clear!

Re:LOVE IT!

[Anonymous Coward]

cayenne8 revealed:

So far, I'm voting with my wallet....I encourage anyone that can to also do so.

Avid Corporation's Pro Tools is the standard DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) in the recording industry. Every professional recording studio uses it, because their customers demand that they do so.

Avid decided more than a decade ago that renting, rather than selling, recording software would be their model - and, like the Adobe examples listed in TFS - they've stuck with it ever since. And their license fees are not cheap. Like, at all. To frost the feces cake, most major makers of audio processing plug-ins have adopted the same strategy. All of which, naturally, makes running a commercial recording studio a hideously expensive business, given how much it costs to design and build one, and how much the necessary hardware (professional-quality microphones, for instance, start at around $1,200 and go way up from there) adds to the start-up expense.

That's why, for my home studio, I chose to go with Reaper, instead. Justin Frankel, the lead developer of the seminal WinAmp music player founded the company that makes it after AOL bought (and promptly forgot about) WinAmp from him for gazillions of dollars. He's publicly stated that the price of Reaper ($60 for private use) is purposely set low to make it affordable for everyone, since he's already rich enough to afford not to gouge his customers - so the cost is just high enough to pay the development team to keep working on the product.

Reaper kicks ass. It's just as capable a product as Pro Tools - and, once you buy it, it's yours. You get no-cost upgrades through the entire major version you bought. And the next one, as well. It's compatible with all the major plug-in formats, and it comes bundled with a whole bunch of them (including VSTi's) at no additional charge. It's WAY more configurable than Pro Tools, it uses very little RAM, comparatively speaking, and it's scriptable up the wazoo.

Oh, and there's a Linux version, as well.

I didn't mean this post to be a Slashvertisment, but I guess it turned into one. Sorry about that. See, my point is that there's a pro-quality alternative to what is practically a software monopoly in the audio recording world, too. And it doesn't require you to compromise on functionality or power.

Fuck rent-seeking. And fuck rent-seekers ...

(Posted as AC only to keep from undoing prior upmods in this thread.)

--

Check out my novel ...

Re:If they release a subscription free version aga

[Ash-Fox]

If something happens that causes CS6 to no longer be suitable then hopefully I'll be able to find a competing software package that is.

You won't, piracy ensures that there are no viable competitors (by perpetuating the most popular, 1st choice software, making it homogeneous). Otherwise competitors would have a chance in surviving in the industry, they simply do not.

Welcome to Capitalism

[Anonymous Coward]

They wrote their software, and can sell it or lease it as they see fit. If you don't like it, feel free to use someone else's software, or to create your own software solution and compete. They aren't being subsidized by tax payers and you aren't forced to buy their software, so they owe you nothing. I guess it always annoys me when someone complains about someone else's pricing model. It's the US, and it's a free country.

Re:LOVE IT!

[Anonymous Coward]

Software activation and DRM play a big role in what you're advocating for as well. It's important to remember that if you "own" a piece of software that requires activation, you own it only until the software company stops activating it, decides you don't deserve another activation, or goes out of business. Forced activation and DRM both meant hat you can't use what you paid for independently of the company you "bought" it from. This has bitten someone I knew in the past when they wanted to use old Adobe (CS/CS2-era) software after a clean OS install. Adobe said "we don't activate that software anymore" with a straight face and they were forced to pay hundreds for all new software they simply didn't need or want. There's no excuse for such a thing ever happening.

Re:LOVE IT!

[Lab Rat Jason]

I'm slumming it with CS2 for the same reason. I literally used Illustrator for the first time in 3 years this past week, and it will likely be another 3 years before I need it again. I don't use it for professional work, just personal projects, so the subscription model is a massive waste of money for me, and frankly it's easier to not have to learn all the new features and changes every time I want to do some tiny little illustration. I really wish they had a hobbyist version that was super cheap and only had core features, but that seems to be the opposite of what adobe is.

Moved to Affinity.

[Kurdy]

This is the reason that I moved to Affinity designer and photo. Reasonable price and it won't stop working suddenly if you don't pay.
I hate the subscription model. I understand why they do it, but as a dissatisfied customer my only voice possible is to buy alternatives.
Affinity Photo is one of the best selling app in the Mac Store and I am sure that this is not estrange to the Adobe new model.

Re:LOVE IT!

[cayenne8]

Interesting info on Pro Tools, and Reaper....

What is your opinion of Logic Pro X in comparison to the other two tools?

Thank you!!

1.Hate 2.Piracy

[Anonymous Coward]

My wife (who has bought some adobe cs version for her business) would need to spend nearly triple the amount than before to have access to the creative cloud. This price increase is not tolerable.

There is no doubt in my mind that this will lead to piracy. The DRM is already cracked. Adobe will lose the money. Piracy will be blamed, not some wacky pricing model.

Re:1.Hate 2.Piracy

[PPH]

That might work for Adobe. But people who use Autodesk products are pretty much screwed. Particularly if they have to submit datasets for permitting processes. Most building departments don't know how to handle anything else. And local building departments don't want to handle local storage for construction documents. Hence 'The Cloud'. And if you need to electronically sign your submitted drawings, that will be done through AutoCAD's built-in function which is undoubtedly tied to your serial number or software lease identity.

Back when my city's building department was discussing processes for electronic signing of permit submittals, their IT 'experts' had no clue that any stand-alone methods or products even existed. They had been trained by Autodesk to believe that only the built-in function would be suitable.

What if Telerik or Infragistics did this?

[Mahldcat]

....or ....At least with Telerik, if you don't renew, you effectively are frozen in place at the version you last installed. I could imagine the chaos and mayhem however if you had 3rd party components that also HAD to phone home to operate :D.

Re:LOVE IT!

[Anonymous Coward]

Avid Corporation's Pro Tools [wikipedia.org] is the standard DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) in the recording industry. Every professional recording studio uses it, because their customers demand that they do so.

Wrong, Ableton Live is THE standard for audio professionals.

It all comes down to Tolerance...

[X!0mbarg]

What would happen if all the major commercial software developers forced this model on everyone simultaneously?

This is the key here.
If they "all" went in this direction, we'll see a great shift to pirated versions (usually the older stuff) or a mass adoption of Freeware or open source software.

That's the way I'll go, if "they" go with such a model.

Anyone else feel this way too?

Fuck them.

[Anonymous Coward]

We barely use 10% of all these features. Stick to the last proper version which serves your needs and spend your money elsewhere.

Hate it.

[andyring]

I absofuckinglutely fucking hate it. Adobe can BURN IN HELL for all I care.

Same

[Anonymous Coward]

I fart around with software as a hobby and I can't justify shelling out every month for something I might use for a couple hours one rainy Sunday. Stopped at CS4; Adobe can bite me.

Garbage

[Anonymous Coward]

Service as a Software Substitute

nope.jpg

Don't buy it

[Anonymous Coward]

One of my clients simply made the choice to no longer purchase Adobe products after they went this route. She continues to use her old, boxed versions to this day.

As an added benefit, it runs great on old machines (air-gapped, not on the internet), so she doesn't always need to follow the forced hardware upgrade model either.

Of course, that means that for newer effects, she is SOL, but her creative content is HER creation, not due to her having some new effect no one has seen before, but rather her artistry on display. She is a real artist.

Re:Don't buy it

[Anonymous Coward]

What's her plan for when the old machines die and the new ones won't run the old software? I mean surely she's *got* a plan?

Re:LOVE IT!

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of using Illustrator, you should give Inkscape a try. It's one of the few open source applications that actually rivals or beats its commercial counterpart.

Sort of

[iamacat]

A lot of mass market software makes more sense as subscription than purchase. For example, customers are not willing to pay a big sum upfront, experience degrades without maintanance and people balk at paying for upgrades while creating bad publicity based on old version, old versions plain do not work on new hardware/OS. A more important thing to demand from a vendor is take out capability for your data, so that you can switch to another vendor if dissatisfied. This will also facilitate development of open source or one time purchase alternatives for those who can't or don't want to rent.

It works if they can't compete with customers.

[superwiz]

It works for any company which has no chance of competing with its clients. I wouldn't store my source code in AWS cloud if I wanted to provide a generic cloud service to developers. But my service has niche, there is no risk that Amazon would compete with me, then why not? Adobe is clearly in the business of making tools for people who are doing something that would not compete with Adobe. Other vendors trying to do this would not work as well. If JetBrains tried it, for example, it wouldn't work as well. Because JetBrains is in the business of software development and it provides tools to software development

Still limping an old MacBook around

[oneiros27]

I wish I had bought CS6 when I knew what was happening. I use InDesign at most 3 times a year for scientific posters ... but InDesign CS5 doesn't work on more recent versions of MacOSX. (I know it crashed on load in Yosemite and after ... CS6 might also)

I don't need recent features, I just need to make my posters, and I'm used to it. (after having to learn it after they killed PageMaker)

The laptop that I'm limping along is probably 7+ years old, and the battery's shot. (won't hold a charge ... which really sucks with the mag connector)

When I next have to make posters, I'll probably spend the $400 for Quark XPress rather than give money to Adobe .. but that also means that I'll likely need to allocate extra time to learn how to use it, set up a new design template, etc. (and I assume I'll still keep the old laptop around, for when I need to extract things from my old posters and such)

Anyone who rails against subscription software ...

[Rambo Tribble]

... should ask, "What have I done for Open Source Software, lately?"

Very smple: End of Business relationship

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking as a private individual: I ran to the shop to get the last non-subscription version of Photoshop before it would be taken off the shelves. After that day, I never ever spent another 0.01$ on them anymore and I never will unless they change course. Which - of course - they won't.

Speaking as a senior manager with a major say in what SW we use at work: Since that day I advice against "going Adobe" whenever I am presented with an opportunity.

sucks for personal use

[smithcl8]

Renting software really sucks when you have to pay for it yourself for your own use. I don't think that the subscription model is really that bad, though, for corporations. The subscription makes the annual cost predictable and you can budget for things. It also keeps rogue IT guys from installing too many copies of the software, thus putting the company at risk of an audit.

You've never actually "owned a copy" of a piece of software anyway. The licensing agreements let you use it for whatever period that you clicked Accept to in the license terms. The subscription model just flattens the cost out of a set number of years, instead of forcing companies to pay a ton up front and then having users fight for upgrades again 3-4 years later.

Now, for home use, it blows. I'm sorry, but I have no reason to personally pay for software that I can get an alternative for for free.

This is the reason FOSS was invented.

[fish_in_the_c]

I'm a little surprised this is even an article on /.
It was exactly this kind of scenario and thought processed that caused the creation of the GNU foundation and FOSS licensing model. Doesn't most everyone here know that?

https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manife...

Rely on a cloud...

[Comboman]

Rely on a cloud and you will eventually get rained on. It's hard to believe that people keep moving to off-site processing and storage at exactly the time that local processing and storage has never been cheaper.

Re:Rely on a cloud...

[david_thornley]

As local processing and storage become cheaper, the relative cost of people who know what they're doing goes up. For places that already run sufficiently large server farms to requite decent admins, this is a cost savings. For someone who is getting started in a small way, something like AWS or Azure is likely to work a lot better than the server being run by somebody who's fuzzy on this backup idea.

Re:LOVE IT!

[Dutch Gun]

I feel fortunate that two software productsI rely on (first for my own projects, now professionally), Corel Suite (Draw, Paint) and Cakewalk Sonar are still available as regular purchased projects. They pretty much both have feature parity with the "big" tools, and really only suffer from not being "the standard that everyone uses." If you're able and willing to move away from that standard, there ARE good choices available.

For some commercial entities, I understand that's not a realistic option. When you hire experienced industry professional, it's likely they already know and are expecting to use Pro Tools or Photoshop. It would probably cost much more to retrain people, and you'd lose compatibility with a large amount of your history, which, because you rent your software, you could no longer access.

I own a copy of Adobe Audition for audio mixing, but I left it at the version just before everything went to a rental model. If I ever find a product as capable as Audition, I'll be switching, but there's very little competition in that space, unfortunately.

Re:LOVE IT!

[nitehawk214]

Was that meant to be a Haiku?

Rune me to death by
a thousand cuts, and I love
the pleasure. And pain.

Re:LOVE IT!

[nitehawk214]

The Lightroom 6 perpetual license is only perpetual as long as you can find a computer to run it. I am already screwed by the fact that they don't natively support Olympus ORF files for the E-M1 Mark II and have to go through an annoying conversion process.

I want to like DarkTable, but they don't support photos in multiple collections, so I would have to scrap my entire organization system. DT is a photo editing system, not really an organization one.

Prohibited

[Anonymous Coward]

The government grants I work under specifically prohibit recurring charges. They want to know: Client needs X, X costs $Y (obtaining quotes from 3 vendors), get it approved with six signatures, buy the software/hardware, one-and-done. Any sort of recurring charge is an absolute no-go.

The other thing to realize is that reliable, always-on broadband internet is very much a pipe dream in many (mostly rural) parts of the country. Or overseas. If I am traveling and need to do design work I don't want my software to think I stole it and shut down because it can't connect to the internet.

It's dead to me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't make my list, let alone my short list.

It sucks

[Zaphod The 42nd]

It sucks and somebody needs to come along and offer a competitive alternative so we can all dump Adobe already.

Screw these subscriptions.

Its short sighted making your legal customers jump through so many hoops while pirates just crack it anyways. DRM doesn't work, its backwards.

NEVER

[Anonymous Coward]

I do not use subscription software EVER!

Back in the 1980's when everybody just copied software, the courts ruled it was legal to do so, but said companies can license it if they like. Funny thing is, companies like Microsoft can license the software, but there is no law requiring you to actually HAVE a license to use it.

I also will not buy any hardware that requires any form of registration in order to unlock it for me to use. My identity or location is none of the manufacturers business. It's MY intellectual property which I don't give up control over.

I use Linux on all of my computers, and any installed software are either free, or a forever license, or I make my own.

I encourage everybody to make your own software with a forever license, and an expiration date that will force it into public domain, even if laws are changed allowing some corporation to hold control for 100 years.

Lossless PSD export?

[tepples]

At least in the case of photoshop, you have the option to export your data in open (jpeg, png etc) formats for use in other tools.

But does this export preserve layers? Otherwise, it's like saying you can downmix a multitrack recording to WAV as a means o migrating from proprietary digital audio workstation software.

Re:Lossless PSD export?

[Anonymous Coward]

You could export each layer/track to a separate file.

Re:Lossless PSD export?

[tepples]

You could export each layer/track to a separate file.

Is that one command for the whole project to produce a folder full of PNGs or WAVs, or is it one command per layer or track?

Re:Lossless PSD export?

[amxcoder]

Not be devil's advocate, but at a last resort, you can usually export multi-layer's out as individual .png or something, a separate image file for each layer if nothing else if available. While not perfect, it's better than flattening it out if you need to preserve the individual layers.

Same with multi-tracks recordings, which are usually just individual .wav's for each track anyway, even when using multi-track DAW software. You wouldn't have to mix down to a 2-chan wav file, just export each track as it's own .wav so you still have multi-track import capability in another DAW.

I don't subscribe

[ReneR]

I'm not going to subscribe to any software. If I want to use it I buy it. If I use it regularly I will update, if not than I'm fine using years, if not decade old software. Simple as that.

creimer spam alert!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

CREIMER' SUBMISSIONS UPDATE:
Note also that creimer is trying to regain karma by getting his submissions published as articles on /. so make sure to go to:
https://slashdot.org/~cdreimer
https://slashdot.org/~criss69
https://slashdot.org/~Anonymou...
https://slashdot.org/~FatCashe...
https://slashdot.org/~ILoveFat...
https://slashdot.org/~IHateFat...
https://slashdot.org/~IAteFatC...
https://slashdot.org/~ITapeFat...
https://slashdot.org/~IApeFatC...
https://slashdot.org/~IPrayFat...
https://slashdot.org/~FatCashe...
and mod down his submissions as well. The great thing is that you don't even need mod points to mod down a submission, just click on the "minus" icon!

Yes, believe it or not, creimer owns all the above sock puppet accounts. It is a mystery why Slashdot management tolerates it!

creimer wrote:

I don't bother with mod points. I'm doing something much more sinister. It took ten story submissions ? I'll have to double check the number ? to move cdreimer's karma from neutral to excellent without ever being exposed to the capricious mods. Mmmmmwwwwahahahahahahaha!

https://slashdot.org/comments....

Danger, Will Robinson, Danger! Creimy is posting more than 2 posts a day. Hurry! mod down otherwise /. will go to hell again!

Note: you can mod down even if already at -1 to lower karma and to prevent lost /. users to accidentally mod up.

creimer wrote:

All you need to do is find a website with a permissive TOS, say, Slashdot, create a Python script to scrape your own comments, sprinkle Amazon affiliate links in various posts, and then re-post past links whenever possible. Won't be long before you start making "coffee money" each month.

https://slashdot.org/comments....

C.D. Reimer is a renowned Slashdot collaborator, as he puts it himself; "Because of the quality of my posts and my article submissions, I'm a highly rated commentator and moderator."

But does anybody ever wondered what "C.D." stands for? Well, it stands for Creimy Dumpty of course!

Creimy Dumpty sat on the wall,
Creimy Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses
And all the king's men
Couldn't put Creimy Dumpty
Together again.

Creimy's siblings video and theme song, very realistic, especially the pants, just like Creimy's:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

With "Vice President Pence Vowing US Astronauts Will Return To the Moon", we are sure they will need miracle workers up there, here is what it would look like. Note that Creimy takes care of bringing a lot of food to the moon as depicted below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Creimy's real pictures:
Before the sex change:
https://ibb.co/cc7Ddw
After the sex change:
https://ibb.co/gVad65

Creimy's "enterprise-level" chair, he talks about it all the time on slashdot:
http://www.keynamics.com/image...

Creimy's head, while his supervisor was talking to him, not with him

Do you mean "shut 'er down"?

[tepples]

You have the resources to absorb the additional hit to your business while you play with options for migrating away from it.

What evidence have you of this? Or in "the additional hit to your business", did you intend to include winding down the business entirely and taking up a completely different profession? That's what bingoUV recommended: professional journalists who can no longer make revenue from advertisements or subscriptions ought to give up journalism and take up (for example) butchering meat.

It's lazy

[Berkyjay]

It's basically admitting that they can't hack it in a normal market with normal competition.

Rent-To-Own

[cordovaCon83]

At this moment the only subscription model I am using is a rent-to-own model. I'm happily paying $10/month for 30 months on a piece of software out of which I get a great deal of use. If I stop using the software then I will close the subscription. Such a model probably curtails a bit of piracy and in my case makes even trying the software a great deal more palatable.

Proprietary firmware

[tepples]

There is no way I would ever use proprietary software for anything mission critical again.

Would that include your CPU's microcode, your motherboard's BIOS or UEFI, or the driver for its GPU or WLAN chipset? If, say, you have a computer that performs this poorly if switched to free software (no suspend, no backlight brightness control, no Bluetooth, no webcam, proprietary audio, proprietary WLAN), with what computer of a similar form factor (tablet with attachable keyboard) would you replace it?

Re:Proprietary firmware

[bingoUV]

Can't answer for GP, but

We openness nuts are quite practical*, as my signature also says in a way. The only difference between us and "normal" people is that our horizon is a bit longer, and we consider more possibilities. Some of us are more paranoid than average.

Many of us were converted into openness nuts by companies causing some harm to us, e.g. by deceiving us. An embrace of openness is driven by 2 factors :

1. Being harmed in this field by lack of openness.
2. Availability of something open which is acceptable in some ways **

In firmware, both factors are weaker than application software and systems software.

* Yes, that means we are not really nuts, but all nuts say that.

** For software, this availability is affected by the correlation of coding ability with interest in that field. This correlation is high in text editors, operating system kernels, web servers. Low in image editors, CAD software, tax software.

Re:Proprietary firmware

[tepples]

availability [of free software for a field] is affected by the correlation of coding ability with interest in that field. This correlation is high in text editors, operating system kernels, web servers. Low in image editors, CAD software, tax software.

A lot of coders are also gamers. So why aren't there more notable free video games that aren't clones of tabletop games, clones of old arcade games, or text-based turn-based roguelikes? Where are the free MMOs to replace the pay-to-play MMOs, which are "Forced Subscription-Only Software"?

Re:Proprietary firmware

[bingoUV]

These gamer-coders do create lots of games. Lots of coders create games in the initial part of their coding hobby. Many make the games available , or outright open source them. The problem is that nobody plays those games.

People play the games that are essentially artwork, mixed with complex programming to interact with complex hardware. Designed with knowledge of psychology (for gameplay to be "fun") that coders ridicule.

Easy

[Opportunist]

Not buying.

NEXT!

L O V E I T ! not

[redelm]

"Never interrupt your enemy while she is making a mistake" [Napoleon 1er]

I dislike secret-source software and I believe this lock-in subscription model is a good example of some reasons (possible abuses). Monopolists leaning on their users just gives more incentive to switch. I doubt PS->GIMP is much worse than MSwin7->MSwin8.

good subject. but

[Anonymous Coward]

Great topic Beau, but it was ruined BY YOUR POOR USE OF THE LANGUAGE. As an editor/producer of content when do you pull you head out of msmash's ass?
fucking stupid

If you had listened...

[Anonymous Coward]

to Richard M. Stallman in the last few decades, you and all the people who are now suffering from the proprietary vendors taking their toys or taxing you, there might be equivalent versions of all of these programs, and the Adobes of the world might be out of business. By buying their licenses, you and other customers allowed them to do this to you.

However, there is still hope. Jump on the bandwagon now. In a few years, you might improve everything to the point of no longer needing these criminals in suits.

Extortion isn't a crime. It's a business model! Buy Adobe!

Re:LOVE IT!

[bad-badtz-maru]

He said in the recording industry and specifically cited recording studios. I doubt anyone's tracking a band into Live. You might argue that Live is the standard tool for music producers, except that R&B and hip hop now have the market lead so we'd probably put good ol' fruity loops at the head of the production pack.

Re: LOVE IT!

[nehumanuscrede]

" That's odd. My pirated copies work just fine. No problems here. "

I just can't bring myself to trust pirated software anymore. I got burned too many times during my Amiga days with all sorts of evil shit that came hidden / bundled with the Yarr Matey versions.

I don't really care for the subscription model, but I use Adobe's software too much to avoid it.

I greatly dislike the fact that Adobe keeps open / talking connections back to their servers at all times. Even more annoying that it's encrypted so I can't see what is going out. I let it talk initially, then a script kills the active processes for the remainder of the session.

I have experimented with Photoshop alternatives, but I find their performance is seriously lacking ( Wacom Mobile Studio Pro platform ) in comparison.

Capture One Pro ( v11 is latest ) works very well for a Lightroom replacement though I don't typically shoot 5k shots that I then have to sort through.

Now, Autodesk can just kiss my ass on their Maya / Max subscription systems. ( I like how they bought and then discontinued Softimage just so they could remove any potential competitors )

Last I checked, they were around the $1500 / year mark ( for a subscription ) and that price is why I got serious about Blender.

Re:LOVE IT!

[bad-badtz-maru]

I don't understand, why wouldn't you buy the Protools Perpetual License instead of the monthly subscription, if that's what you prefer?

Horse before the carriage eh

[Anonymous Coward]

Stuff like this leads to Piracy, because come on, I obviously want muh supah-sekkit plans on the Internetz /.s

If it ain't broke don't fix it.

[pubwvj]

Same here. I have been buying Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop since versions 1.0 and I've simply stuck with the last purchased version when they switched to renting. I don't want to lose access to my data. I don't trust Adobe to keep supporting their software. So far I've not seen anything in the feature list of upgrades that I particularly want so it isn't hard to just stay with what I have. If it ain't broke don't fix it.

Greed over Product Satisfaction

[CAOgdin]

1. When companies make a good, useful product, customers will buy it.
2. When investors dictate that they must have a particular financial product, quality and features go to hell.
3. I weaned myself off Adobe several years ago, when it was clear they were MORE interested in income than in CUSTOMER satisfaction. When they stopped providing any meaningful "Customer Service."
4. I have, so far, been steadfast in my decision to only buy from companies who are focused on CUSTOMER satisfaction, rather than short-term greed.

Adobe is dead to me. Ghostscript has so many useful front-ends that make it viable in many environments (e.g., producing a PDF from a webpage, which most products do by making "snapshots" of the text). Tools like Bullzip (the browser add-in relying on Ghostscript) produces near-perfect PDF files that can be imported into good text editors for annotation, amendment and incremental improvement.

Re:LOVE IT!

[PetiePooo]

That is not a poem.
It has no iamb heartbeat.
There should be a flow.

No, thank you

[Anonymous Coward]

No exceptions!

I have peace of mind this way. Any money in my pocket.

Re:LOVE IT!

[ncc74656]

The Lightroom 6 perpetual license is only perpetual as long as you can find a computer to run it. I am already screwed by the fact that they don't natively support Olympus ORF files for the E-M1 Mark II and have to go through an annoying conversion process.

Install it in a VM and you can run it as long as you can find a computer to run the VM. That should get a few more years out of it, at a minimum.

(In the not-too-distant future, I get to migrate an old version of Cisco CallManager (spread across three servers, two of which run Linux and one of which runs Win2K (!)...it's that old, and the servers running it have been here longer than the nearly 10 years I've been here) onto a new VMware box. I hope that imaging the existing servers and making sure the VMs have access to our voice VLAN will be sufficient. It'd also be nice if Win2K didn't bitch too much about having its hardware swapped out from underneath it.)

Only for games

[Anonymous Coward]

Contributing money to development is fine, but the more important the software is, the less it makes sense to be using something proprietary. You don't want critical or business stuff to ever be hostage or require special permissions/licensing. Games are the only software I would ever buy or rent.

If you need it, then it has to be Free, so that you can count on it working, have maintenance available (even if you have to hire someone), etc. Proprietary software is a bad fit for any sort of professional situation, so it's really hard to imagine a rational person thinking that either a subscription or a purchase is a reasonable approach. What if the company goes out of business? What if they stop supporting your OS? (Or what if they haven't started yet?) What if they put DRM or other anti-user "features" in it, since it's more designed to serve the maker than the user? What if it simply has some random bug that the developer can't recreate or doesn't afflict enough people to merit fixing (despite your opinion, as a user, to the contrary)?

Maybe if you have absolutely no risk-aversion (e.g. perhaps "we're all going to die someday anyway" is your personal motto) then buying or subscribing to software could be ok, but I only go there with games, since even the most beloved game is something I can live without or switch to something else.

The terms are the problem not the cost

[sjbe]

The last list price of Photoshop was $700, but even at $500, that's what apparently is now 4 years of subscription.

Doesn't really matter how many years it is. The problem is the subscription terms, not the cost. I can afford the subscription but if I stop paying for whatever reason I'm screwed or have to go to heroic measures to recapture my data. A lot can happen in 4 years. Plus I still use applications I acquired 10+ years ago and have no need to "upgrade". Why should I be stuck in a one sided contract with the devil for upgrades I don't actually need?

Re:The terms are the problem not the cost

[Gr8Apes]

I still use applications I acquired 10+ years ago and have no need to "upgrade".

Exactly this. Until recently I still used a couple of apps from back in the early 2000s (Actually, I think I still have one) and they worked fine until the most recent OS updates deleted a few deprecated APIs that some depended upon. What's really cool, though, is that you can run some of those older programs in VMs and they work as well or better, because the hardware has improved that much. So that works for me.

Part of the reason is in your comments

[Anonymous Coward]

You said it doesn't matter what the consumer wants. It seems to me that anyone who calls you a "consumer" really has no respect for you. They should be calling you a "customer", with all the implications of you being the the one who supports them by purchasing their product.

Apples vs Apples

[Anonymous Coward]

I have used LibreOffice professionally. It's not unusable that way. The big proprietary corps have brainwashed many.

Also - new software in this realm is as powerful as some of the proprietary counterparts (DarkTable comes to mind).

Gimp's user interface takes awhile to master. None of the naysayers have taken the required time to internalize it, would be my guess.

Subscription revenues are stable

[sjbe]

Now, some people MAY swallow a $100 sub over a $1500 license a bit easier but I really question how much they've really improved their income from those not inclined to spend money in the first place.

Evidently enough to make it worth the trouble. Subscription revenues tend to be a lot more consistent. Under a standalone license the cash flow from customers is kind of lumpy and unpredictable. Plus you have to sell them on the upgrades (which is expensive) and you can't guarantee they will actually buy the new version. Subscriptions do away with that and make the incoming revenue much more predictable which companies and Wall Street like. Problem is that they are a bit of a faustian bargain for a lot of people. The subscription might be short term cheaper but long term more expensive and you have to give away a lot of control over your data.

I get why companies do it. It makes sense for them financially. But for me at least it's too much of a one sided deal.

Re:Subscription revenues are stable

[ewibble]

Yes you have to sell people upgrades. That forces the developer to make upgrades the users actually want. Under a subscription model people are just forced to get the upgrades no matter what just to keep old functionality. If adobe cannot produce upgrades that people are willing to buy then the should rightly go bankrupt, that is what a free market is about compete or die.

Subscriptions Encourage Alternatives and Downgrade

[pubwvj]

I have been buying Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop since versions 1.0 and I've simply stuck with the last purchased version when they switched to renting.

I am considering getting Affinity Photo (https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/) which looks really good. That leaves Adobe Illustrator at issue. Does anyone know of a similar alternative that will give me full access to all my old Illustrator files?

Key for me is that I don't want to lose access to my data. I don't trust Adobe to keep supporting their software. So far I've not seen anything in the feature list of upgrades from Adobe that I particularly want so it isn't hard to just stay with what I have.

If it ain't broke don't fix it.

Use open software or shut up

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't help curling my lip at all the butt hurt over being locked in to vendors. And yet the fools just continue right on and reward the very abuse they're complaining about by knuckling under and paying for it!

You were told decades ago. You were told and you didn't listen.
Use open software or else you sacrifice your freedom-- and thus also potentially your livelihood.
You don't even have to be all religious about it; just think carefully about who owns what software that you depend on and whether you can access the fruits of your labor or whether it's valuable to you and by how much. But fools won't even do that much thinking and then they get booty bothered when they suffer the inevitable "abuse"!

I don't even blame Adobe or Autodesk or Microsoft or whoever: they're acting rationally and not directly coercing anyone.
I blame the idiots that voluntarily jumped onto a locked-in platform that they knew was locked in (not necessarily a problem in itself...) and now they complain because they don't like how the ship is being steered!

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

HATE IT!

[RIPgriggs]

I have used adobe acrobat for many years. I even paid for adobe acrobat XL a few years ago.. I am able to edit PDF's and do everything I need to do. One day they tricked me into doing an update and all of a sudden I had DC... cool DC is AWESOME!!! - Then 30 days later they are telling me I need to buy it... okay? i thought it was free upgrade... apparently not.. WELL it is good software, how much is it? 200$? WHAT? - plus a monthly subscription? WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON? I went through support and jumped all kinds of hoops.. and in the end they SHAFTED ME!! I could not downgrade, I had to buy a new XL license since my old key was lost in the upgrade that they tricked me into doing... when its all said and done.. i'm using foxit... and it does everything i need it to do. they are trying to force you to use all these cloud services and that is why they need to charge subscription per month. its crazy! i hate it!

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Welcome to the Subscription Economy

[Anonymous Coward]

I had the misfortune of working at Zuora, so I've got a leg up on this.

Zuora is a dot com that handles subscription-oriented payments. They invented this model - the "subscription economy" - and, basically, they want everyone to become a renter of everything. That's the future they are pushing. "Renter economy" would be more honest.

'How The Subscription Economy Is Disrupting The Traditional Business Model', https://www.forbes.com/sites/k...

Also: 'The Subscription Economy', https://www.zuora.com/vision/s...

Internally, Zuora is more of a sales organization than a software organization. Technical support is also huge. More on that, below.

When I was there the Sales Team had a ship's bell, and they would ring it whenever they got a sale, and have a loud celebration - this, in an office where everyone except the executives were in one large room, with tables crammed together, in rows, back-to-back, like a school cafeteria full of workstations. Imagine trying to design an infrastructure in such an environment!

Technical Support was huge because the software had problems. So did the infrastructure. There was a mailing list for software developers, it was all the output collected from the running JVM, and it was pages and pages and pages and pages and pages of runtime errors, thousands of errors that nobody had time to fix because they were too busy getting rich to do it right.

While I was there Zuora had huge plans to roll out their infrastructure at some place outside Las Vegas. Their lead guy had brought some confidential plans from his former employer, eBay, on how to rack things. I sensed that Las Vegas was more about hookers then it was about infrastructure. The whole thing seemed pretty flaky. Supposedly it had military level security. Yawn.

I don't mind saying that, despite the military security, the root password on EVERYTHING was "zuora123", that everyone knew what the root password was, and that Zuora had a VPN direct to Shanghai, where all of their Java programmers were - which basically meant that the Chinese mainland had a direct channel into the heart of the infrastructure that I was tasked with protecting. The CEO is Chinese, you see.

It's not clear to me what the consequences of mainland China having direct access to the credit information of every gwailo wealthy enough to live this sort of a subscription-based lifestyle, but I'm sure it was useful for Chinese intelligence in refining their human intelligence.

So, welcome to the subscription economy. Credit cards only. The future is here. Get in line, please ... and bend over.

Re:LOVE IT!

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless a company has engaged in large-scale anticompetitive practices to abuse it's market position (looking at you, Microsoft), I don't have a problem renting software. If I reckon I'll get $10, $20, $50/mo use from it, and there's not a cheaper alternative, then why not? Certainly better than shelling out thousands on products that may or may not get updates, or might be rendered obsolete by a competitor or new technology next year.

I'm still a little annoyed at Adobe for buying and ruining Macromedia, but I save far more money than I spend by using creative suite and it's ecosystem of filters, assets, tutorials and support compared to using other products, so it's a good deal for me. A lot of it is just network effects - there's loads of stuff to help people use CS because everyone uses CS - but I honestly don't think there is a better competitor to Photoshop at any price even if that weren't a consideration.

If I was a uni student forced to pay for it for a course, or if my local government required documents submitted with proprietary software then I'd be complaining loudly about how unfair that was, but I don't have a problem with rental vs purchase for software so long as it isn't the only game in town.

Photolab, someone?

[Herve5]

I am not young : I discovered Photolab, the initial software before it was bought by Adobe and renamed Photoshop. I think at the time the complete package did fit within a single 400K disk ;-)

I have used *many* successive versions of Photoshop -I remember when the fashion was to add 'Kai Power Tools' and if you didn't have KPT you were being considered a beginner :-)
(who remember this?)

I am lucky : I only have thousands of pictures to handle, and I am satisfied with the EXIF way of tagging.
Because of that probably, I have sitched away from Photoshop *years* ago.

I now use Rawtherapee daily, and Darktable for some arcane noise removing capacity that I found nowhere else (by 'nowhere' I mean, after having tried all paid solutions).

When I bought my last Leica, there was a free Adobe license associated with it. I went through the painful process of installing it -and definitely it was painful, having to cancel the automatic monthly subscriptions to select the permanent version, which actually needed me asking for help on the Adobe forums.

It lasted, I'd say, four months until I decided to clean it up.

It is quite sad you consider locked in, but, well, it's you...

I just moved on to other tools

[Anonymous Coward]

My last version of Adobe creative suite was 5.5
When they started selling subscriptions only I just moved on to other tools.
Don't miss Adobe at all.

Re:LOVE IT!

[TheFakeTimCook]

Interesting info on Pro Tools, and Reaper....

What is your opinion of Logic Pro X in comparison to the other two tools?

Thank you!!

Logic Pro X is an EXCELLENT DAW, easily equal to or better than ProTools. Outside of the USA (curiously enough), it is quite well-represented. And even in the USA, since Macs own Pro Audio, most pro studios support Logic as well as ProTools.

And it isn't a Subscription model. $199 and its yours. Forever.

And if you do things live, MainStage3 is a spectacular package. I think it is like $30.

Re:LOVE IT!

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I'm generally against piracy, but in that case I don't have an ethical problem with it. If you properly bought something clearly intended to be a perpetual licence, and if it came with a tool to transfer that licence to a new machine if you needed to, then any attempt to renege on that deal after the fact by the developer seems to be unethical at best, and finding an "alternative source" for exactly what you would be entitled to run anyway is literally not damaging the copyright holder at all. Obviously the law may disagree and what you choose to do about that is a personal decision.

My view is likely the same as many others...

[rnturn]

Dim.

Die rentier blood-suckers, die!

It's a horrid thing.

[Heebie]

I absolutely loathe the concept of software being subscription-only in this fashion. I purchased Photoshop and Lightroom as stand-alone products as one-off expenses. I upgraded them the same way... so I have perpetual licenses. I haven't moved on to the "cloud" based products, because if I decide to stop paying, or lose the ability to pay, a subscription, I want my software to still work. If there was desktop colour control in Linux, and it was supported well in The GIMP, that's probably what I would use. Darktable isn't ready for prime-time as a Lightroom replacement, but down the road, hopefully it will be... and good colour control will get added to X.

Re:LOVE IT!

[Anonymous Coward]

Burma shave.

Adobe subscription is ok

[roc97007]

In general I'm opposed to subscription-only software. I was extremely annoyed when Adobe adopted the model, and considered again, for the hundredth time, to drop them and find a substitute. (And again, it was easier to just continue with Adobe.)

Being on the Adobe subscription for awhile now, I have to say, it's not that bad. At $10 a month for lightroom and photoshop, the fee isn't onerous. You're not required to have a continuous internet connection, so you can still use the tools in the field as long as you call home once in awhile. You can have CC installed on multiple machines. Updates are continuous, instead of yearly or bi-yearly step functions, which makes the learning curve more gentle.

Interestingly, Adobe's current model of small continuous updates seems to have improved the quality of the updates as well. If I was going to update from, say, lightroom 4 to 5, I'd first spend significant time scouring the user groups, trying to understand what the bugs were going to be and how they'd affect my workflow. That particular version, as I recall, had a bug in noise reduction, and since I do mostly low light photography, that was a deal-killer for me until it was fixed in a later minor release.

After a few years on subscription, I've yet to have an update create problems for me. I think this is because the updates themselves are smaller, and they don't have to line up -- for instance, in the old days, if noise reduction isn't ready by ship date for a major release, they'd had to ship it anyway.

That said, I remain opposed to subscription to operating systems. I'm struggling to articulate why, but the OS is the *OS*, it's not an application. It just loads my programs and manages my resources. I don't care a great deal what the OS looks like as long as it's reliable. We're far enough up on the OS curve now that we're not going to see any really innovative changes in how to do work. A certain company, on the other hand, seems to think that the next OS release should have a different look and feel seemingly just to be different. And every significant change slows down my work while I try to figure out where the heck they put a particular resource management widget *this* time.

I understand that in enterprise installations there are service contracts for bug fixes and support, but that's a different thing.

I've said this many times, but it bears repeating -- if Adobe ever ported CC to Linux, Microsoft would never get a dime from me again.

Stopped buy!

[stedlj]

I simply stopped buying then next version of Photoshop, using the old version and slowly learning GIMP, problem solved.

Adobe not allowed

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm, Adobe is the worst software maker on the planet, and it's been years since my security policy allowed their bits anywhere near my computers. Hopefully they will charge exorbitant prices and accelerate their irrelevancy that much faster.

Problem is... (MS, Intel, etc)

[neurocutie]

Of course the obvious thing to do is to 1) find free equivalents, 2) hang on to the non-ransomware versions as long as possible.

But particularly in regards to #2: It won't last forever.... e.g. I have a piece of software I really like using. However it does not work on Windows 10. MS at some point will change Windows sufficiently to break your old copies of Photoshop, or the market will move off of Intel CPUs (e.g. to ARM or OpenRISC or whatever), which will also break these old copies.

Hanging on to old non-ransomware/rental software won't work in the long run, or even medium run. I've still got machines running Win XP, 2000. etc because of similar issues, but I know it won't last. Both hardware and OS/API changes (and the demands of keeping things secure over the Internet, etc) will force constant updates.

So yea, I guess free software (i.e. open source) is really the best solution... But support small companies that refuse to rent their products.

Re:Problem is... (MS, Intel, etc)

[Reziac]

Run a VM for old OS and old software.

Or keep around old PC for when you need same.

Or do like me, become a curmudgeon and live in a cave. ;)

Re:Problem is... (MS, Intel, etc) and File Formats

[neurocutie]

Forgot to add the third factor: File formats. If the hardware and OS/API changes won't get you, the file format changes will. Most people have to SHARE files with the rest of the world. The shift from .DOC and .XLS to .DOCX and .XLSX forced a lot of MS Office upgrades on people even if they were perfectly happy with older copies of Office. As long as the file formats are also controlled by these same entities that want constant upgrades, most of the market will be forced to upgrades anyways. Hence the importance of not letting proprietary image formats overtake .JPG and .TIF.

Re:LOVE IT!

[roc97007]

While Adobe has put out "some" upgrades and new features over these past few years of Creative Cloud, I frankly haven't found anything there to be groundbreaking, that I cannot work without. IMHO, the adage that if they don't have incentive to innovate (due to steady income stream no matter what) they won't. And I don't see that they have really.

I think that's pretty much true. The "killer feature" that pushed me to CC was the haze filter in Lightroom. I was on LR5 at the time and struggling with a huge batch of photos taken in a dark enclosed stadium with high windows all around and a bright day outside. Haze was bad. Switching to LR CC saved that shoot, but in the years since there hasn't been a lot of change.

That said, Adobe now has a new Lightroom in Creative Cloud, and have renamed their original product "lightroom classic", but the new product doesn't meet my needs, yet. It's possible that Classic will go away at some point, but I can't worry about that now.

Re:LOVE IT!

[cayenne8]

Logic Pro X is an EXCELLENT DAW, easily equal to or better than ProTools. Outside of the USA (curiously enough), it is quite well-represented. And even in the USA, since Macs own Pro Audio, most pro studios support Logic as well as ProTools.

And it isn't a Subscription model. $199 and its yours. Forever.

And if you do things live, MainStage3 is a spectacular package. I think it is like $30.

Ok thank you!!

This year, I'm upgrading my work station from the MBP late 2011 core i7 16GB ram...and getting an iMac Pro....

Awhile back, I went and applied at a local community college for the grad program. Mind you, I never enrolled or took a class. I paid about $25 application fee, and likely $35 or so for transcripts to be sent there. And I went and got my Student ID made...which has NO expiration date.

I now use this to get educational software and hardware.

When I get the iMac pro, I can also get the educational bundle they offer for $199 with Logic, FPCX (I already have this),, Motion, Compressor, and the MainStage, etc.....so, I think I'f go for it.

I really don't know music,..but I do own more guitars than I know chords...and awhile back, bought a midi keyboard..so, thinking I can plug in and maybe try to learn to do some simple things for my videos, etc.

LOL...yeah, awhile back, I thought if you bought enough equipment, you'd eventually sounds like Jimmy Page.

Apparently I missed the part about hard work and practicing...hahaha.

Anyway, again, thank you for the input!!

What About Hardware Subscriptions?

[HiloJoe]

Is this a likelihood as well? And if the consumer specifies the software she will use on the device, she could buy a customized machine with regular software upgrades and, say yearly, a new machine. The vendor sends a new machine at that time, complete with the latest versions of the software specified by the purchaser already installed. She transfers the data to the new machine and wipes it from the old machine (if that's not already done by the vendor), then puts the old machine into the box the new machine came in and sends it back where the materials are recycled. Maybe not but it looks like we're headed to something like it..

Re:It's ALL good

[angel'o'sphere]

It might run into law suits and probably be problmeatic in the USA, however file formats etc. are by law not under copyright or patent able.
Or in other words, making software products interoperable is a priviledge explicitely granted by copyright law.

Re:LOVE IT!

[cayenne8]

The "killer feature" that pushed me to CC was the haze filter in Lightroom.

Yeah, I've seen the haze filter in LR...I thought that came first in LR6...is it really CC only?

It does work...but I believe that it is mostly a contrast control. I don't know for sure, but I think I read that somewhere and there is likely a way to de-haze with the other tools.

Hmm...that might just give me something fun to play with this weekend!!!

:)

Teamviewer did the same - dirt bags!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Teamviewer did the same. dirt bags. their need for greed. for now, i'll let them be, sort of.

Capitalism is the Issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't get me wrong, I love well regulated capitalism, it's a powerful economic engine that has created some great things.

But capitalism requires growth, perpetual, which is impossible, so companies get creative in finding ways to increase revenue.

So instead of saying "this app is a mature product, we should downsize", we get vendor lock in schemes, EULA's that shouldn't be legal, rent seeking, demands for tax breaks, etc, poorly thought out M&A.

Until we allow a business to die a peaceful death, we're going to keep getting BS options like subscriptions.

Autodesk Eagle

[jwdb]

Same problem with Autodesk's acquisition of the PCB tool Eagle. I'm remaining on an older version because I use the software irregularly and am not willing to lose access to all my past projects just because I missed a license payment. Subscription tools are fine for at the office (within reason), not so much for personal use.

Re:Autodesk Eagle

[not-quite-rite]

KiCad has an excellent Eagle import tool.

I use Altium in my day to day work, and used Eagle in my personal projects for a couple of years. Coming back to start doing some personal projects again, I decided to switch to something that better aligned with my workflow AND principles. KiCad satisfies this, and the upcoming version 5 is looking very very good.

I continue to be confused why all these Open Hardware projects are using Eagle: a closed source badly designed tool, that has also moved to a terrible subscription model after being purchased by Autodesk.

Re:Autodesk Eagle

[jwdb]

I think mainly because whether or not it's badly designed is somewhat subjective. I tried KiCad a number of years ago but much preferred Eagle - maybe that's changed and I should try it again with the new version.

Either way, as long as the old version of Eagle works for me, I have absolutely no interest in climbing on the Autodesk subscription treadwheel.

Re:LOVE IT!

[roc97007]

The "killer feature" that pushed me to CC was the haze filter in Lightroom.

Yeah, I've seen the haze filter in LR...I thought that came first in LR6...is it really CC only?

I don't remember precisely. I was on 5 at the time. In any case, it was cheaper on the short term to go with CC than to upgrade to 6.

It does work...but I believe that it is mostly a contrast control. I don't know for sure, but I think I read that somewhere and there is likely a way to de-haze with the other tools.

Hmm...that might just give me something fun to play with this weekend!!!

:)

When you de-haze, you can see other sliders moving when you move the de-haze slider. (This is more visible if, as do I, you have a midi controller with motorized sliders bound to the most used Lightroom controls.) So yes, there's probably a way to do it by making fine adjustments with other parameters. (Probably highlights, blacks, and contrast.) But in my case I had to process hundreds of photos in a very short time, and having a single de-haze slider was a huge time saver.

Great opportunity for FOSS

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately most of the FOSS world is terribly organized. Everyone wants to be in charge and that's why we have thousands of crappy projects and only a few great ones.

But if some people in the FOSS world, and there are some great ones (Red Hat, Canonical, etc), can monetize this and market it well, it's a fantastic opportunity to sell to people and corporations who still want to OWN their software.

Extortion

[outlaw69]

No thanks - I'll keep my old versions forever and not upgrade. I refuse to have monthly extortion payments.

Re:Extortion

[ebvwfbw]

Works for a while. Eventually your machine won't work anymore and the OS won't support your old box software. I have premier pro, the sound, dvd creator... whole set from Adobe. Now they don't even offer the DVD creator, what worked well. I used to do videos for people. Weddings, high school stuff... all kinds of stuff. I gave it up and sold all my equipment.

Re:LOVE IT!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually many big name musicians use Live. You have no clue what you are talking about, amateur.

Easiest Answer Ever

[gordguide]

This one is simple. Move to a subscription-only revenue model, and I buy something else or find some other way to do whatever it was you aided me to do. Maybe I'll even discover I don't need no stinkin' software in the first place for the tasks I had previously assigned to your app.

As for the other doomsday scenarios (every app on Earth suddenly switching to a sub model ... really?) I'll find a way, and so will the developers who jump into the now wide-open and ripe-for-the-pickings market hole you left behind.

I no longer use Photoshop (longtime user since Photoshop v2.5). I do just fine without it, and don't lose any functionality, and suprise, suprise ... do it for less than even a PS upgrade license.

MS Office? The question is silly; I do have a copy but I've never, not once, composed a document in Word (since 1990). Same as Photoshop ... my first copy ran on MacOS System 6.0.8. My last version is probably my last, as the standalone license options are diminishing.

I have always used other text or word processing software. My copy sits there to read documents others send me. No other reason. Same with Excel ... I use it, but with documents others send me. I use others to create my own documents (and prefer database apps to spreadsheets in the first place, but that's neither here nor there).

Go ahead. Lose what has been a five figure outlay over almost thirty years of computing use, for me, just one simple user with no business requirements. Careful what you wish for ...

Re:LOVE IT!

[bad-badtz-maru]

So, just so I understand, you're saying that everyone using Live professionally to create recorded music isn't eventually exporting stems for import into Pro Tools or Logic for final mixing? Because they are.

Consistent Recurring Revenue Stream

[Proudrooster]

Would you rather have?

A huge one time hit every 4-5 years or a reasonable yearly/monthy fee.

This new subscription model is probably good for everyone since most American's can't budget and companies need to know where their next dollar is coming from so they can afford development teams to make new fancy software features.

Personally, I am not subscribing to anything at the moment and am using old software like CS 5.5 or one time purchases like Apple Final Cut and Logic. However, if I need to do a project, I may subscribe to Adobe for a couple of months to rent the new software.

Overal, while distasteful, I think subscriptions reduce piracy and help companies with forecasting of revenue streams. It cuts both ways, you can't have new shiny features without paying developers and if you can't figure out your revenue, you are less likely to hire developers.

Re:Consistent Recurring Revenue Stream

[Reziac]

Subscription is a tolerable argument, for some users, so long as your created files are not held hostage, and are yours to take wherever you wish whether you subscribe or not.

But as soon as your files are held hostage, it's not subscription; it's extortion.

Re:LOVE IT!

[cayenne8]

When you de-haze, you can see other sliders moving when you move the de-haze slider. (This is more visible if, as do I, you have a midi controller with motorized sliders bound to the most used Lightroom controls.) So yes, there's probably a way to do it by making fine adjustments with other parameters. (Probably highlights, blacks, and contrast.) But in my case I had to process hundreds of photos in a very short time, and having a single de-haze slider was a huge time saver.

Hey, thanks for the info on the haze slider's effect on the other sliders!!!

Like I said, I might play with this this weekend..and that info helps!!

Re:LOVE IT!

[Anonymous Coward]

Go die in a fire with a can of shaving cream up your ass.

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Re:L O V E I T ! not

[phantomfive]

A decade ago, Gimp was mostly compareable to Photoshop. Today, Photoshop has continued to improve and now Gimp is far behind.

Re:LOVE IT!

[TheFakeTimCook]

Logic Pro X is an EXCELLENT DAW, easily equal to or better than ProTools. Outside of the USA (curiously enough), it is quite well-represented. And even in the USA, since Macs own Pro Audio, most pro studios support Logic as well as ProTools.

And it isn't a Subscription model. $199 and its yours. Forever.

And if you do things live, MainStage3 is a spectacular package. I think it is like $30.

Ok thank you!!

This year, I'm upgrading my work station from the MBP late 2011 core i7 16GB ram...and getting an iMac Pro....

Awhile back, I went and applied at a local community college for the grad program. Mind you, I never enrolled or took a class. I paid about $25 application fee, and likely $35 or so for transcripts to be sent there. And I went and got my Student ID made...which has NO expiration date.

I now use this to get educational software and hardware.

When I get the iMac pro, I can also get the educational bundle they offer for $199 with Logic, FPCX (I already have this),, Motion, Compressor, and the MainStage, etc.....so, I think I'f go for it.

I really don't know music,..but I do own more guitars than I know chords...and awhile back, bought a midi keyboard..so, thinking I can plug in and maybe try to learn to do some simple things for my videos, etc.

LOL...yeah, awhile back, I thought if you bought enough equipment, you'd eventually sounds like Jimmy Page.

Apparently I missed the part about hard work and practicing...hahaha.

Anyway, again, thank you for the input!!

Yeah, and with all the software instruments that Logic Pro and Mainstage come with, you will have a BLAST with that MIDI keyboard!!!

Oh yeah, that Educational Bundle is the best-kept secret on the planet!!!

Now, if THAT isn't the Deal of the Century, I don't know what is!

Looks like it's still a "thing"...

https://www.apple.com/us-k12/s...

Have fun!

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Meanwhile...

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in government IT and worked with pay as an essential employee during the government shutdown. As for the non-essential average computer user, they got a day off without pay to participate in the Women's March and wear pink pussy hats..

Meanwhile, everybody is waiting and hoping for creimer shutdown...

Re: LOVE IT!

[eggz128]

When Adobe stopped activating CS2 they actually offered a version for download without activation built in and included the serial number

Re:It's ALL good

[tepples]

Making your product compatible with a competitor's file format - a necessary step in "breaking into" a deeply entrenched market like AutoDesk - will likely result in lawsuits and possibly run afoul of DMCA laws.

I thought the DMCA had an explicit exception for reverse engineering for interoperability in 17 USC 1201(f).

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Ask for specs

[tepples]

Some municipalities even explicitly require AutoCAD/Revit files as part of the deliverables.

Ask such municipalities for a copy of complete specifications of the file formats in question, so that your service can comply with the municipality's requirements. If you did, what was the reply?

Re:Ask for specs

[GrpA]

Most wouldn't have any idea how to help you comply or care about their obligations under law.... But if it's just AutoCAD files, you don't need AutoDESK. In fact, you can provide better files with competing CAD packages.

Re:LOVE IT!

[schklerg]

I've just been looking into a home version of Pro Tools. Audacity & Ardour have some stuff, but I'm definitely giving reaper a shot. Thanks for the post.

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There is an upside

[Anonymous Coward]

I canâ(TM)t afford $1000 for photoshop and Lightroom but if I want to use it for a while, letâ(TM)s say to catalog and tweak vacation or holiday photos, I can rent it for like $10 a month. Not bad in my view. Sure thereâ(TM)s a down side but letâ(TM)s not miss the positive.

I Refuse

[cybersquid]

I simply refuse to rent software for content creation. It's a bad idea.

Autodesk Fusion 360

[ElizabethGreene]

AutoDesk's Fusion 360 product is changing my mind on this.

Without F360 I'd be on FOSS cad/cam. I've tried many, and let me be the first to say they suck compared to commercial products. More specifically, foss cad is "ok". Foss cam is abysmal. Foss 4-axis or more cam is non-existent.

Now I can get the hobbyist edition of F360 for free, Commercial for $40/month (with occasional $99/year sales), and the pro version (with 5 axis capability) for $190/month or $1500 per year. Moving between editions is easy, and they don't watermark the free version's files either.

F360 is adding features crazy fast and most of the features flow all the way into the free version. The only thing I miss in the free version is 4th-axis CAM. By moving to the subscription model they've made software I couldn't afford available to me. It's a pretty good deal. Their investments in building a community, being responsive to user requests, teaching, and improving the product just makes it better.

(Not paid shilling, just a happy customer.)

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For corporate, non issue

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a non-issue and all advantages for most corporate.

Why?

They'd normally buy the software initially and then pay a yearly maintenance to keep up to date. Rental saves them the cost of buying the software initially - usually the rental fee is the same as the maintenance fee anyway. So, it's a straight money saving for them. (Sure, they don't have the right to use the software once they stop paying -- but these corporates weren't going to do that anyway.)

It also buries the costs as opex rather than capex. Normally an easier approval process, an easier accounting process, and usually a vastly simpler tax treatment. No asset to capitalise and deprecate (just possibly a balance day adjustment if you pay annually).

The main downsides for corporates are NOT the direct financial:
* Different cost models. $x / month / user is one thing. But I've seen $x per calendar hour per user. (Used at all between 1 and 2 pm by bob? That's an hour!) And $x per 24 hour period. And all sorts of weird variants
* Hassle of maintaining users. Microsoft are in the lead here - at LEAST they have computer administrator scriptable systems and powershell cmdlets. But every vendor seems to want their own systems
* Lack of financial oversight - previously, the IT dept could control the budget. Now, software vendors are pushing that to the end users - they use the product, and I.T. gets the bill. There's no ability for I.T. to keep any control over this. (I've seen this all over the show - the vendor claims it's flexibility, but in reality it's get money. Classic example, I have paid for 'x maximum users in a calendar hour', and the staff could rearrange work during the day to stay under that limit. The Vendor doesn't allow me to control this, so a dozen users could use it for 1-2 pm, but the rest of the day it's not used at all. Upshot, I have to buy 3rd party licensing enforcement program to avoid overrunning and getting silly emails from Vendor demanding I buy more licenses.)
* Direct marketing - the vendor now has email addresses and wants to market to the users directly via email so they waste lots of money on new products. (Recommend people consider quarantining email from your vendors.)
* No two vendors do it the same. Your software licensing management staff have $n systems to worry about and maintain. (Sure, they might be good like Microsoft and have some sort of API or integration. Most won't. They generally assume your company exists solely to use their one product.)
* Vendor arrogance - related is the philosophy where each vendor assumes you have the time to manually do everything on their site and that you only have one or two applications to manage. Not the hundreds that you probably really have.

So, summary, the downsides aren't really in the up-front cost - as corporates were paying that anyway - or in the lack of post subscription access - because coprorates weren't going to use that anyway. It's the OTHER aspects.

Sub-only software? I can do wifout!

[RFjunkie]

Greetings- I'm OTD, a retired engineer/firefighter/compooter geek in my late seventies. I've enjoyed the evolution of compooters, the Intertoobs, and most of the related shif. I've outlived most of my meat-friends, leaving only a phew I trade emails and stuff with. I wouldn't be caught DEAD on Facebook or similar traps. I seriously enjoy having essentially ALL of the world's knowledge at my fingertips, and MY info still largely remains private. Sure, I miss the good trivia games we used to play, back pre-Gooble. Well, anywho, I ramble. Cannabis, and nice dark beers'll do that to ya. The thang is, sure, I use some softwares, like most of y'all. Wherever possible, however, I use freewares, things like GIMP. There's reasonable substitutes for damn near every software thing, and there's always been 'ways' to get it free. I'm not wealthy, so I don't feel bad about getting a "evaluation copy" of something I need. Again, tho, most progs have free, or a helluvalot cheaper, alternatives, and I'm a cheap bastard, and good at it. My ol' lady reminds me of that often, bless her lil heart. ;P~~ I enjoy photography and video, and the tools today are just fucking awesome. Growing up when I did, I'd love to go back and give teenage hippie me a few of today's goodies. Blow his lil mind, I'd. Even so, most stuff needs some related software, and the Intertubularian ecosystem. Gotta wuvvit! I really dig this stuff, these tools, these toys, the gadgets/gizmos/doodads, etc. If I was FORCED to consider paying a rental for something,one of those incredibly rare things I find no freeware/purchase outright alternative for, I'd be -extremely- reluctant. Even more so if they call it a "fee", that word and "trump" just chaps my ass. At this moment, I can't think of anything I'd pay more than a coupla bucks monthly for, and even then, there may be periods of several months I don't use it. I'd like not to pay for it if I ain't using it. Well, I'm a lilbit stoned, so I'm ramblin', (kinda)sorry, y'all. The point is, finally, if I had to, I could turn thia whole thing off, get by with just my cellyphone and the 'tubes. That's the gift gettin' old gives me, I care less and less about more and more as time passes. I could just as easily relax wif my guitars, cameras, cats and the wife(in no particular order). If they insist on makin' me pay a monthly subscription, I don't HAVE TO use any of their shit. Y'all younger folks, having grown up with all this neat stuff, might see it differently. I understand, sure, the 14-year-old me would have LOVEd to have as little as my latest custom-made compooter, the control set, the 70in. HD screen and Prepar3d, awesome flight sim. I don't pass my medical anymore, but I've enjoyed flight simulations since the very first 8-bit sims came out. I've happily watched 'em evolve, hard- and software pushing each other, and even tho a coupla friends don't quite "get" why this otherwise adult guy still likes to fly virtually, I just smile, roll another one, and go fly anywhere in the world. I need no Intertoob conx, and no permission from anyfuckinbody to do it. I can take virtually unlimited pictures on my excellent cameras, and process 'em as I like, save 'em as I need, and again, don't have to pay anyfuckinbody any more than I already have for the privilege of my toys. They can demand that everybody pay, but in fact, they can't touch this ol' fart. I GOT mine, and don't need their permission. Good luck, y'all. I don't envy young people today, your future looks like SHIT. I'm profoundly grateful that I was young when I was, made the choices I made, and have ticked all but a coupla boxes on my bucket list. This issue? I'm so beyond it. Good lusk, y'all!

Did something change?

[WillgasM]

We're not just running sketchy, cracked copies of PS anymore?

Alternatives. Reminds me of Linux rising

[Pezbian]

I've seen what happens when subscriptions aren't renewed. I've also seen prices increase over time.
Impermanence is just one more failure point to have to deal with.

I see the same thing with hardware purchased secondhand that has a non-transferable license to the software required to run it.
You call the manufacturer and end up learning you can get a license... for some incredibly outlandish price.

I'm reminded of how it used to be that you could sell your old game cartridges or discs... not anymore.

For things like Photoshop and 3DSMax/Maya, there are things like GIMP and Blender. Granted, they're not perfect replacements, but much like getting sick of Microsoft's antics resulted in proliferation of Linux, all it takes is people getting fed-up enough to jump ship and tilt the market share enough to make the alternative attractive enough to invest in.

Re:LOVE IT!

[zuki]

Interesting info on Pro Tools, and Reaper....

What is your opinion of Logic Pro X in comparison to the other two tools?

Been using Logic for almost two decades, and unquestionably it has its strengths like how powerful MIDI editing can be. (in order to leverage this power, some serious learning is required with 'The Environment')

That being said, I wouldn't be so quick in calling either of these programs the equal of ProTools® when it comes to mixing, mainly because of the extensive routing and bussing capabilities that the latter has, which must be one of the reasons why it has become such a de-facto standard for serious recording studios planet-wide. ProTools 10 licenses can still be acquired legally at second-hand prices on eBay, and I personally found this a reasonable compromise, it is a very mature but reasonably robust product.

Sure PT10 might not have a few of the newest bells and whistles like offline bouncing, but if you absolutely require these for your work then you (or your employer) would most likely be able to afford to pony up for the latest on subscription.

For reference (and not directed to the hobbyist) most electronic music professionals I know use a different software suite like Ableton's most excellent Live, Logic, Cubase or Reaper and then export their stems into Pro Tools for mixing in that format. While you may argue that you work differently, we're talking about things on the professional level, and there's no getting around the fact that this is what most mix engineers are good with and will demand it in order to do their work.

Replacement for Acrobat Distiller?

[jmichaelg]

I hadn't realized Adobe had gone subscription only. The last time I had to update Adobe Acrobat, it was still for sale. At some point I can see it needing an upgrade so I have to start thinking about how to alter the document production flow.

I use two pieces of Adobe Acrobat every day. One piece looks like a printer that my code prints to. The output consists of ps files that go to disk.

The other piece is Adobe Distiller which bundles up the multiple ps files into a single pdf. The pdf gets emailed to my clients.

Any suggestions for replacements?

you've "outed" yourself as a short-sighted youth

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes... $100/year is cheaper than $600/year in year #1
but in year 2 it's $200 vs $600 and by year 6 it's $600 vs $600.
After year 6, the option you chose is a big loser. This reckless and short-sighted view of spending is why so many younger people have no emergency savings and may never be able to afford to retire (well, that plus needing a new $1000 cell phone every other year...)

The stupid that seems to echo in the heads of some people is amazing.

The reason all these big companies are going to this model is very simple: they get more money from you [facepalm]

The old model for computing was that businesses leased the computers and terminals and software, paying monthly fees. Then, along came the micro computer revolution and guys like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs destroyed many of the old big fat & happy companies with a simple proposition: you can buy your computer once, and buy the software once and own it all and own your own data permanently. The argument was so good, Microsoft and Apple became giants and most people stopped using systems from DEC, and its old peers. Of course, as the new upstarts became near monopolies and all the available consumers were already customers, these publicly-traded companies needed to convince their investors that more growth in revenue was possible (i.e. they could squeeze more money out of their customer base) and so each started talking about going to the very monthly fee model they all grew up by destroying. That's when we all started hearing about "the cloud" (a re-invention of the idea that they own the storage of your data and you will eventually be convinced to pay monthly fees for access) and all the monoplostic companies which have market dominance in their fields (like adobe and autodesk) started talking about "subscriptions" (monthly fees) i.e. the old rental model.

This is ad financially dumb for the consumer as renting an apartment or renting a car... you pay all the costs (enough that the actual owner can pay all the actual costs PLUS make a profit) and then in the end you have NO asset (the guy you have rented from has the asset).

It's the dumbest financial plan ever invented, from the consumer point of view.

The stuff should be avoided just like "payday loans" and loans from some guy in the alley named Guido...

and by implication...

[Anonymous Coward]

If they own your company's data and intellectual property, then THEY own your company too.

Yup.

Do all your business in "the cloud" and let Google index all your company data and help your team search it, and let Facebook manage all your company's communications, and let Microsoft and Autodesk and Adobe lock all your data into proprietary files only their software can access.

Do YOU still have a company, or do THEY? And when your competitors get your IP, how do you know how they got it? If you have political opinions they do not like, or if they decide they'd like to dominate the market you are in, and they decide they do not want to be "tainted" by having you as a customer, or do not want you as a competitor, will they shut you down and give away your assets? Are you still free?

You're paying the wrong people

[Anonymous Coward]

Y'know, if instead of paying these companies such ridiculous sums a year, you gave that money to the opensource project that most closely matches your usecase, be it Blender, LibreOffice, GIMP or whatever, I suspect they would very quickly grow to supplant the software that is shafting you.

What if - good question

[fyngyrz]

I agree you don't want your data locked up by the application sw vendor (or a hacker) but what will you do when win10 is deprecated and your old software no longer works on win11...?

The answer to that, at least so far, is "run it in a VM."

I have all my Windows stuff running fine in a VM right now. In OSX, no less. The Windows is prevented from getting to the network, so MS can't screw it up and my stuff should continue to work well into the future.

Same thing for Apple: They're actively planning on screwing with 32-bit app compatibility. Well, I have a 32-bit-happy version of OS X running in a VM. I'll just move whatever I need to over there.

Sure, some time in the future this may all fall over. But we're not even close yet, and no matter what, I won't encourage subscription / rental.

New Cameras, image formats, and the like

[fyngyrz]

Yep I thought that too until I bought a new camera which then produced files which couldn't be opened by it. We're not all playing with TIFFs and JPEGs here.

I deal with RAW files too. But not in Photoshop. That's the least reasonable tool for me to use for my photos. Lightroom (again, the most recent non-sub version) is presently the way to go there, and if that stops working, I'm already well on the way into developing a replacement.

Same as my view on any subscriptions

[HalAtWork]

I don't want any and avoid them. I'd rather pay up front for what I need, pick and choose.

Shit. I won't use it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Subscription only can suck me.

This model is only beneficial if.....

[Anonymous Coward]

If the monthly cost is lower than what it would cost me to buy the software maybe it would make sense.....

It most cases in IT you buy yearly maintenance on software for support and updated. It's nice to have a way out of yearly costs and still get to keep the software. Instead of the software just deactivating.

giving themselves rope

[Anonymous Coward]

If they want to degrade the quality of their software, be my guest. I'm under no obligation to purchase their software.

The more important question is: should we be letting educational institutions teach students with this forced-subscription model? I argue that we shouldn't subsidize business models through public funds. We need libre software if we're going to control access to our own creations.

try krita

[Anonymous Coward]

I've heard about krita https://krita.org/

Where there's a will, there's a way.

[Anonymous Coward]

I paid for the full version. Then the update locked my files into the new format, used by the subscription-only version. You can bitch, you can whine, or you can drop that shit into IDA. Two x86 instructions later, there's no problem. Autodesk, fuck you.

Re:It's ALL good

[Smidge204]

I said "possibly" because it's not immediately clear to me (IANAL) if that means reverse engineering a file format so you can read it into your software, or so you can read AND write that format. If you can't write the format as well, it's not good enough to be a replacement.

=Smidge=

Just say NO

[shubus]

Yup! No perpetual license==NO SALE.

Software will never ACTUALLY be a service

[Anonymous Coward]

I will never rent a piece of software. Everyone expects to own their software regardless of what big business wants.

We "get around" DRM and activation. We ignore EULAs.

Of course, we never actually collectively talk with our money. I can't wait until it costs a dime to press "=" on your calculator.

I don't like it.

[sabbede]

'nuff said.

Heh

[Anonymous Coward]

Gimp, inkscape, blender and linux. Adobe can blow me...

Re:Anyone who rails against subscription software

[Anonymous Coward]

"What have I done for Open Source Software, lately?"

Rolled my eyes when social justice politics became more important than software.

Alternatives?

[sjbe]

You can, I think, still get a permanent license of Lightroom.

Yes an old and unsupported version. No thanks. I'll just use software from a company that values my business or open source.

Actually, I'm in the market for some decent photo management software, any suggestions on competitors for Lightroom and the dead Aperture?

Sadly I haven't yet found anything worth bothering with. Might be something decent out there but I haven't seen anything I find satisfactory yet.

No turning back

[Anonymous Coward]

Soon enough we'll be asking the same thing about cars.

From one who decided to go with Adobe...

[Anonymous Coward]

I had to decide what to do about the Adobe programs when they went to the subscription model, and after a lot of hesitation, I did decide to subscribe. I know... I know... I have to hide it from all the open source purists, and they throw things... ;) But this is what I chose to do. I use many of the programs-- (PS, AE, Illy, InDesign, Audition at least). I would not recommend this for anyone who just opens Photoshop once in a while, because they need to go with Gimp. There are ways around it, yes (although I have never found a really decent open source motion graphics sub for After Effects.) It just takes so much less time and mental gymnastics to use the programs that are designed to work together. I'm not extremely happy about ONLY having this model, but again, if you use at least 5 or 6 of the programs, I think it's worth it. My final answer is... I'll spend my money the way I want and you spend yours the way you want.

The great IT Circle of Life

[BubbaJonBoy]

In the beginning software was paid for by seat and ran on big iron with shared access on a network.
The workers revolted and invented personal computers so the power was no longer in the hands of the Priesthood..
No longer shall we be tied to big iron and slow processes!
Software was developed to run on these personal computers freeing the peasants from onerous per seat licensing fees and making their work their own.
Workers rejoiced! "No longer shall we tithe for the right to work!"
Software developers rejoiced as their market expanded into the millions! Money was made by adding new features and selling as "upgrades".

Then lo! After many years the peasants were no longer buying into annual upgrades with steep fees.
The workers proclaimed "The software I have does everything I need it to!"
"What shall we do?" lamented the software developers who had become fat and wealthy from the annual upgrade paths.
"I know! We'll change it to a subscription model and host all the workers data in the cloud which is cleverly disguised big iron on a shared network.
And thus begat a new cycle with software paid for by an recurring seat fee holding the workers hostage to their software and hosted on big iron.
The IT Great Circle of Life is complete.

Renting Software? ...

[donak]

I don't buy it.

Inexpensive shareware...

[MercTech]

Sorry Adobe, but I've gone to using a suite of shareware programs to do what I once did with Photoshop. I now control when and how to upgrade and have no license lock up idiocy to contend with. Yeah, it is harder to use three programs instead of one but it is an order of magnitude cheaper in software cost and not all that much more expensive in time used. 99% of what I need to do can be done with Gimp and Graphics Workshop.

HATE IT

[Anonymous Coward]

I loathe the trend toward expensive cloud-based subscription software. Subscriptions are horribly expensive. And browser-based applications are not as good as native applications, only work when you have internet, and force sharing personal or company data with companies and third parties. I will continue to seek quality native desktop applications and will resist the cloud/subscription model at home and at work wherever possible.

The mainframe returns

[Mister Null]

This IBM's old method of doing business except they sold the mainframe for a price then charged you for, JCL, Fortran, Cobal and whatever. Eventually, people rebelled and we have Unix and open source. After there are open source tools that do what they do (note open source does not mean free), then they will either go back to an own it forever model or die.

No

[aestrivex]

Have never purchased any subscription software of any kind, and will never purchase any subscription software of any kind under any circumstances ever no matter what.

I don't extend to holding the company accountable for offering such a product by refusing to buy any product from them again ever. For instance I bought the Elder Scrolls Online from Bethesda, after it was no longer subscription based. But I feel like those tactics are warranted.

Re:LOVE IT!

[amxcoder]

I have been using Reaper for a few months now, as I needed a DAW software and I don't run Mac, so ProTools was not an option for any price. Reaper is awesome, and the price is right too. And a free 90day trial to boot, so you know if you like it before you plunk down the $60 for the full license.

Who Needs To Trust Their Computer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Subscription-only services are a great step towards companies owning all of the computers, for all intents and purposes, even if you - in theory - own it. So basically they buy it with your money and you rent it. They get a permanent back door and soon enough anti-piracy measures may be pushed in, essentially locking you out of controlling your device, meaning they can spy on you, interfere with your work, censor things, and all manner of other things to their heart's content. And of course, it will be illegal to try to mess with that so you can actually decide what your computer can and cannot do, because "only pirates could possibly want that." If you want to write software, be ready to pay 10-100 times as much and undergo even more monitoring, and quite possibly have the companies keep an eye on your work to develop similar products to whatever it is you're putting together.

Best of all, this means the NSA can now just negotiate a good deal with the companies that provide these services to get a massive dragnet at a fraction of the cost.

All for a low low monthly fee!

Deplorable policy

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally I deplore this trend, but it has been a standard practice with Adobe for about fifteen years. Back then, I was a freelance designer using Adobe products, among others. Letâ(TM)s take Photoshop as an example: by 2006 Pshop already had all the functionality any designer would need, a very capable and commercially practical product, so why would a user need to âoeupgradeâ?
But Adobe could not afford to restrict their income stream, and came up with the âsubscription onlyâ(TM) model. Larger businesses just rolled over and accepted it, and Adobe had an assured, ongoing income stream. Smaller users such as myself, who did not wish to subscribe for useless âupdatesâ(TM) were left with the boxed package they last bought, eg CS2.
OK, my CS2 still works fine, but with limitations. I have to stay with a very outdated version of OSX, and my legitimate, purchased copy of Acrobat wonâ(TM)t run. Adobe theoretically offer unsupported downloads of legacy packages for legitimate licensees, bu they make you jump through impossible hoops and usually donâ(TM)t work anyway.
I understand why they felt they had to initiate this policy, but it has put many users in a difficult position. I for one am now retired, but use my software for voluntary work. I donâ(TM)t get paid for that, and canâ(TM)t afford subscription fees. I think they should have offered an alternative upgrade path in some way.
So yes, I deplore this policy.Personally I deplore this trend, but it has been a standard practice with Adobe for about fifteen years. Back then, I was a freelance designer using Adobe products, among others. Letâ(TM)s take Photoshop as an example: by 2006 Pshop already had all the functionality any designer would need, a very capable and commercially practical product, so why would a user need to âoeupgradeâ?
But Adobe could not afford to restrict their income stream, and came up with the âsubscription onlyâ(TM) model. Larger businesses just rolled over and accepted it, and Adobe had an assured, ongoing income stream. Smaller users such as myself, who did not wish to subscribe for useless âupdatesâ(TM) were left with the boxed package they last bought, eg CS2.
OK, my CS2 still works fine, but with limitations. I have to stay with a very outdated version of OSX, and my legitimate, purchased copy of Acrobat wonâ(TM)t run. Adobe theoretically offer unsupported downloads of legacy packages for legitimate licensees, bu they make you jump through impossible hoops and usually donâ(TM)t work anyway.
I understand why they felt they had to initiate this policy, but it has put many users in a difficult position. I for one am now retired, but use my software for voluntary work. I donâ(TM)t get paid for that, and canâ(TM)t afford subscription fees. I think they should have offered an alternative upgrade path in some way.
So yes, I deplore this policy.

Opinion? - Action!

[Tug3]

I currently still work with Adobe Production Suite CS6. (Mostly Photoshop, Premier Pro & Audion.) Luckily it still works!

Although I have started looking into options and once none of the ones I am considering are subscription based. All "buy to own" -type. So for me, it will be bye-bye Adobe. (NOT buy-buy Adobe.) "We had a great time together, but I guess our views differ so much now that we should just start looking other software/customers."

Lucky for me, the competition has really caught up with Adobe. And all can import my files/projects, so I'm not loosing any old work.

Does this answer the question?

The Add-ons Dilemma

[Anonymous Coward]

As an Indie Thunderbird / Seamonkey / Postbox / Waterfox / Ex-Firefox Add-ons developer I have to say that switching to at least Freemium subscription models is the best way to go: hand out free versions of the software which are regularly updated for free and sell yearly subscriptions for "pro-level" versions of the software. Whether Software should be auto-renewal subscription or just expire is an individual call.

But the reason for not having perpertual licenses for Add-ons is that without regular maintenance and a usual 6-weeks release cycle of the multiple host systems the expectation that Add-ons would function for more than a year (let alon perpetuity) is preposterous. At least in the browser market innovation is aggressive and as shown with the release of Firefox Quantum (version 57) last fall, many Add-ons were rendered completely dysfunctional. One of the consequences was that the capabilities (since now the chrome sandbox model was applied to all Add-ons, and also XPCOM and XUL / overlay mechanisms were removed) were severely diminished, for added security and chrome compatibility (Web Extensions)

As a result a lot of developers simply walked away. Once you have a subscription model for software there is a much bigger incentive to keep Add-ons working into the future.

So even if you want to develop completely free (as in beer) software, in this model you will have to perpetually work into the future in order to support your legacy user base, and you don't want to choose between the old (I never update my host software because of the old add-ons, it works don't fix it) crowd and the cutting edge (always run the latest beta, daily or nightly builds, and report anything unexpected) crowd, so you're relegated to endlessly writing shim code to stay backward compatible.

For example the advent of ECMA script 1.7 was a bit of a conundrum as the introduction of for..of and deprecation of for..in would lead to Syntax errors in older hosts (Postbox) and I had to find a way to bake both possibilities into the same software (forking is too time expensive - the solution was using platform specific overlay paths in chrome.manifest).

Freemium is a good compromise as it also includes an incentive for improving (adding new premium features) in order to reward users for paying for a yearly subscription. The hardest thing here (as with any product) is finding an acceptable price point, but thankfully with software you can use marketing to serve various users. (E.g. a special 50% off period around black Friday / Xmas.)

In conclusion, the subscription model is going to seep into open source and is around to stay, and it's not a bad thing.

Re:The Add-ons Dilemma

[RealRaven2000]

I meant to log in when I wrote this. Should use /. more often...

As an Indie Thunderbird / Seamonkey / Postbox / Waterfox / Ex-Firefox Add-ons developer I have to say that switching to at least Freemium subscription models is the best way to go: hand out free versions of the software which are regularly updated for free and sell yearly subscriptions for "pro-level" versions of the software. Whether Software should be auto-renewal subscription or just expire is an individual call.

But the reason for not having perpertual licenses for Add-ons is that without regular maintenance and a usual 6-weeks release cycle of the multiple host systems the expectation that Add-ons would function for more than a year (let alon perpetuity) is preposterous. At least in the browser market innovation is aggressive and as shown with the release of Firefox Quantum (version 57) last fall, many Add-ons were rendered completely dysfunctional. One of the consequences was that the capabilities (since now the chrome sandbox model was applied to all Add-ons, and also XPCOM and XUL / overlay mechanisms were removed) were severely diminished, for added security and chrome compatibility (Web Extensions)

As a result a lot of developers simply walked away. Once you have a subscription model for software there is a much bigger incentive to keep Add-ons working into the future.

So even if you want to develop completely free (as in beer) software, in this model you will have to perpetually work into the future in order to support your legacy user base, and you don't want to choose between the old (I never update my host software because of the old add-ons, it works don't fix it) crowd and the cutting edge (always run the latest beta, daily or nightly builds, and report anything unexpected) crowd, so you're relegated to endlessly writing shim code to stay backward compatible.

For example the advent of ECMA script 1.7 was a bit of a conundrum as the introduction of for..of and deprecation of for..in would lead to Syntax errors in older hosts (Postbox) and I had to find a way to bake both possibilities into the same software (forking is too time expensive - the solution was using platform specific overlay paths in chrome.manifest).

Freemium is a good compromise as it also includes an incentive for improving (adding new premium features) in order to reward users for paying for a yearly subscription. The hardest thing here (as with any product) is finding an acceptable price point, but thankfully with software you can use marketing to serve various users. (E.g. a special 50% off period around black Friday / Xmas.)

In conclusion, the subscription model is going to seep into open source and is around to stay, and it's not a bad thing.

Most professional printers to RGB.

[Anonymous Coward]

So your complaint is entirely moot. And it was never valid for web or computer work. Stop talking bollocks.

I'd Retire

[Geek On The Hill]

I'm already semi-retired, and if all DCC software went subscription-only, I'd fully retire.

I just canceled my Adobe subscription this past month after using their software for something like 18 or 19 years if you include the legacy Macromedia days. I believe the feeling I had when I clicked the "Cancel" button must be very much like how prisoners feel when their release dates come around. I am overjoyed to be rid of Adobe's noose around my neck.

Fortunately, there never will come the day when there are no outright purchase options for most people's needs. A very few may be so locked into some product or another that there simply is no substitute; but for the rest of us, the hatred of subscriptions will always result in the availability of options via the magic of the free markets.

In my own case, I only used Dreamweaver out of habit. I really didn't need it and hadn't used the WYSIWYG functionality in many years. Netbeans and a local Apache server do the job quite nicely for me, as would any of the bazillion other text editors and IDE's out there.

If you do need WYSIWYG, BlueGriffon and Pinegrow are capable replacements. I tried them out when I decided to cancel my Adobe subscription, but ultimately settled on Netbeans instead. CoffeeCup also seems to still be in business and at least used to be WYSIWYG many years ago.

Serif Affinity Photo and Affinity Design replace Fireworks, Photoshop and Illustrator for my particular workflow needs (and maybe yours). They follow in Serif's long tradition of publishing high-quality, yet inexpensive software. I highly recommend that you try them out if you're looking to break Adobe's stranglehold on your wallet. (And no, I don't work for Serif.)

For video editing, practically any non-linear editor is good enough for me. I used Premiere Pro because it was included with CC, not because I actually needed anything that powerful. Magix Movie Edit Pro Premium is inexpensive, stable (probably more stable than Premiere Pro, to be honest), non-subscription, and more than powerful enough for my needs. I'm not Spielberg, after all.

I think a lot of people who claim that they simply must have some particular application just don't want to learn a replacement. If you open Affinity Photo expecting a clone of Photoshop, for example, you'll probably be disappointed. But most of the functionality is in there if you look for it. It just isn't where you're used to it being.

It took my finally get sick enough of having Adobe's noose around my neck for me to invest the time to look for and learn how to use replacements. It also took a few weeks of slower workflow and longer hours while I re-learned the muscle-memory part of my job to the point that repetitive operations became automatic again. But now that I've shed Adobe's chains, I'm happy that I did.

Screw Adobe and their subscription model. They lost a nearly 20-year customer, and I'm doing just fine without them.

Richard

The result od the subscription model

[Anonymous Coward]

Well , I'm no totally against paid subscription as long as they charge a small, fair price. You just can't divide the box price for 12 and use this is a bottom line price for a month subscription. Your software price reflect your costs and if you are going to receive a steadly monthly fee, your costs can be reduced a lot because you can have an estimate of your income for the role year and can adjust for that. What didn't happen when you have a shelf price and you just don't know how much you gonna sell. So the subscription price has to drop , a lot. As the industry will never do that and as computer use varies too much , this model will probably fail in the next years , so I hope. Imagine have to pay for OS,Office Suite,Photo Editing, CAD, Database, Communication, email and so on. That's a huge driver for FOSS, FSF and others thank all these stupid idiots from software companies to allow that. Autodesk is paying for their choices and is paying hard, 7 Quarters in sequence with losses and still going to down, Bricsys and Dassault on the other hand, with no subscription, both got some profit in 2017 (even been a low one) , so what is the smart choice ? People are not just paying , that's the truth and I hope they understand the message !

Autodesk profits map since 2014 : https://goo.gl/vZqWza

Nope

[tezbobobo]

Speaking for a friend: he used to religiously upgrade his software every two cycles. With the monthly subscription model he only downloads the software illegally.

Re:LOVE IT!

[Anonymous Coward]

Subscription software is where a company heads once it has a monopoly/heavy lock-in/is industry standard. Adobe, Microsoft etc. All the same. It doesn't drive innovation or improvement, it drives only their bottom line. You are just perfecting the slow bleed of your customer base. No different from commercial landlords that base retailer rent on their turnover, demanding a full reveal of the books in order to set rent levels.