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

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.

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: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.