I don't like Adobe's 12 month lock-in pricing, but saying subscription software should be illegal is ridiculous. Especially using a single company's practices as proof.
This just strikes me as an angry rant post with a selfish premise. There is no consideration about the sustainability of a software business and why they tend to move towards subscription-bases. And consider how much value you are getting out of the tool.
Does $50/month for the tool that allows you to do your trade (and always having access to the latest features) really seem ridiculous? Seems like a fairly trivial business expense to me.
But if you don't like it, don't use premiere. There are plenty of options out there that aren't subscription only.
The thing about subscription software is that it's brand new. If you're under 40 you probably don't even realize this, but it's a weird new invention to us old timers, and a massive shift in the economics of technology that tends to extract a lot more money out of consumers, but not necessarily to their benefit.
From my perspective (as a consumer and employee of a large software company) all the innovation is centered around the demand for perpetual earnings growth. Few people seem to actually be trying to move the needle forward or truly improve a process, it's just making bills go up a little bit more every month.
Google just announced an unprecedented $25 billion in share buybacks. We're getting so good at extracting every penny as efficiently as possible from every segment that we literally have no idea what to do with all the cash anymore.
Thank you for calling out the real cause of these issues. Shareholders, with their insatiable greed, demand more and more from all companies across the whole economy. Subscription models--rent-seeking--is a little peek into this reality.
The thing about subscription software is that it's brand new. If you're under 40 you probably don't even realize this, but it's a weird new invention to us old timers, and a massive shift in the economics of technology that tends to extract a lot more money out of consumers, but not necessarily to their benefit.
This is demonstrably not true. Take Microsoft Office for instance. I got my first Mac in 1992. Office was $600 for the Mac. You were only suppose to use it on Macs you owned, and you definitely couldn’t get a Windows version for free if you owned the Mac version.
Now, for $100 a year, I can get Office and run it on my Mac, Windows PC, iPhone, iPad, web and Android device if I had one. I also get one terabyte of storage and add up to five additional users with the same benefit.
The usual counterpoint is that you could spend the $600 a month and own it “forever”. But if I had bought Office in 1992, I would have had to have an emulated version in 1997 for the PPC Macs, if I had bought it in 1997, I would have had a non native classic MacOS version.
Today the situation would have been worse with the iOS release cycle if I were stuck on an older version.
Nobody paid $600 for Office. A few large companies did, maybe, but nobody else. That's kind of the whole point of subscription software, right? To cut back on the insane 90%+ piracy rates of the good old days?
Yes. And I get far more value out of the $100 a year Office subscription that is continuously updated than I did out of the pirated Word 5.1 that I kept for years past it’s prime.
It seems like a win/win. Microsoft gets more money from me and I get more value from Microsoft.
The problem is that they’ve trapped businesses in with proprietary file formats, and are now using that to bend everyone over a barrel and hold them hostage.
You want to move to Affinity? Good luck when your corporate client requires you to edit an .indd file created years ago when the license didn’t require large sums of money regularly thrown at it.
Cory Doctorow lately has been on a kick for something he calls adversarial interoperability. He's advocating for things like making it legal to reverse-engineer file formats.
Maybe instead of banning subscription formats, make it unenforceable for a TOS to ban reverse-engineering for compatibility reasons.
>> for something he calls adversarial interoperability
Cory Doctorow has had a lot of interesting ideas, but he didn't coin the term adveserial interoperability. It's a concept and term that predates the Web, and is absolutely the appropriate solution to many of our current predicaments.
All of this has happened before and it will all happen again.
> make it unenforceable for a TOS to ban reverse-engineering for compatibility reasons
While I appreciate that (and since I don't appreciate my work being locked up in proprietary formats, I primarily use either plain-text or LaTeX for documents), there's a whole can of worms around that.
[note that I do not know the specific details of .PSD files, nor the patent status of things below. It's an example]
As an example off the top of my head, Photoshop has a feature called "Content-aware Fill". This lets you delete a region of an image and have it be replaced by auto-generated "reasonable" context (if you delete someone standing on a hill with the sky behind them, it'll interpolate grass and sky for you).
So now I'm reverse-engineering the .PSD format, and discover that a content-aware fill operation is stored in the file as the pixel coordinates and CAF parameters; not the pixels themselves. The CAF algorithm is patented. What now? Under your proposal I'd be justified in carrying on figuring out how to make an interoperable implementation, but... I couldn't distribute that implementation without violating Adobe's patent.
When Indesign was new and everyone was pissed at Quark, Adobe made it possible to import Quark files. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough to get you over the transition. Something like this would surely be possible with Indesign files.
subscription software should be illegal _if_ the software does not also contain a feature to port/export your data out in a standard (and supported-by-a-competitor) format.
If they are able to hold your data hostage, then it's not a free-association relationship, and should not be called a subscription, but instead an extortion. Sell me a perpetual license, or sell me a subscription plus ability to move away.
Why ? You can test the trial for free and discover for yourself that you'll be locked in -- or not.
BTW Photoshop's .psd can be opened in others software. You can export FCP XML from Premiere Pro for Final Cut Pro and DaVinci Resolve (and probably others NLE). You can open Premiere Pro's .prproj, unzip it, extract the XML and edit it yourself; The same goes for After Effects projects, based on RIFF https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Interchange_File_Form....
Please educate yourself little bit about the products you're criticizing
IDK about InDesign but for their Video software they are one of the most open that exists on the market, and that's why even though they are very buggy they are still worth it. The market for plugins, panels and scripts for Premiere Pro and After Effects is huge
Adobe has always made it a priority to be able to export your entire document in IDML. There's nothing hidden or proprietary in there--just all of the InDesign document content and settings.
In fact, it's standard operating procedures to "cleanse" an .indd file by exporting to IDML and re-importing.
It's up to you to implement something on the receiving end, but there's no lack of openness on Adobe's part.
> Does $50/month for the tool that allows you to do your trade (and always having access to the latest features) really seem ridiculous? Seems like a fairly trivial business expense to me.
It would absolutely seem ridiculous if that tool was a drill, or a saw, or a ladder. Those are critical parts of doing business in the building trades.
Software is of course a little more difficult. If executed well, many types of software should be a naturally dead-end business model. Develop, fix some issues, ship, sell, be done with it. Not entirely different from building a house, or a car - you could tinker with either one of those indefinitely as well, but that doesn't make it a worthwhile business model.
If the push to continuously redesign and add new features for the sake of continuing revenue generation wasn't there, software can eventually be close enough to bug free to close the book on it. Take video games for example - they are complicated pieces of software, but you can still play 10, 20, 30 year old games with little or no issues at all.
> and always having access to the latest features
Thing is, most people don't actually want this, and even many who do don't value it nearly as highly as the software companies want to charge for it. Hell, some people pay significant amounts of extra money for "enterprise" software support just to not have new features added.
> Seems like a fairly trivial business expense to me.
Consider a freelancer, relatively new to their chosen profession with a sawtooth cashflow. A one time purchase means they can continue to do their job for as long as the app they bought works on the OS they work on. A subscription service means a bad couple of months and an unexpected bill locks them out of opening any of their old work and limits their ability to do / get new work. Your argument boils down to "well I can afford it, so everyone should be able to"
Subscriptions absolutely benefit cash strapped freelancers. Rather than having to outright pay several hundreds or a thousand dollars up front on software, they can get by for 10s of dollars a month. As long as they are getting any sort of work, they can easily offset the cost of the software.
But nobody is forcing you to use Adobe products. Buy the Affinity tools or use GIMP if you like.
Consider the same freelancer, new to their profession with limited start up capital unable to purchase the adobe suite he trained on in college so he has a choice, try and learn a whole new tool and hope there's a FOSS or cheaper equivalent or pirate the software and buy a licence when the money rolls in.
how much was adobe to buy outright? CS6 master collection was what, $7,000
I for one could never upfront that, but $70 a month for 100 months, including all updates in that time and new products as they release? sure, im game.
Hot take: Subscription models actually reflect the costs of software development better than an one-off purchase. They link the value provided by updates/maintenance to a tangible cost. If we agree that software isn't ever finished, shouldn't the economics reflect that?
Adobe expects businessess to pay for the tools of their trade, not hobbyists.
Consumers are better served by a front-loaded buy-once model that includes free updates, but Adobe doesn't want to be in the B2C space.
The author also describes Adobe's products as "basic tools". As someone who doesn't use them, they seem anything but.
> Hot take: Subscription models actually reflect the costs of software development better than an one-off purchase. They link the value provided by updates/maintenance to a tangible cost.
I don’t agree with this at all. I believe subscription models encourage laziness and/or introduction of unnecessary or complex features (to show that busywork is being done).
Sell a license for applications with support included for a year or whatever, like developers used to and still do. If you continue providing more value to customers, and if you aren’t too greedy to introduce new versions and upgrades for trivial updates often, why would the majority of your customers not purchase a paid upgrade every couple of years or so?
I feel there are many areas that are saturated and that developers struggle to figure out how to add more value...or rather, extract more money from customers (1Password in recent years is an example of this, in my experience).
Note that for mobile apps, paid upgrades aren’t really an option for developers due to the way the app stores work. Also, developers constantly need to update apps to be compatible with new OS releases. Only the subscription model aligns with this.
But if you stop a CC subscription, you lose access to the software you did like as well. In contrast, the entirely legal, bought-at-considerable-cost version of Creative Suite that remains installed on one of the PCs at work is still working just fine after all this time.
Also, the alternative we're increasingly using now (the Affinity suite) doesn't cost anything like thousands for a permanent licence, so this idea that it's somehow necessary to charge that kind of money to make software development viable in this market is demonstrably wrong.
Is there a piece of software that doesn’t require even occasional bug fixes or updates in order for it to run reliably on even a single operating system/browser?
But when all your apps stop working every time you install a major OS update, are you saying you would be happy to pay again? Because most people will whine like crazy.
Adobe could easily crank up the price up to 10000$ per month and still, with total certainty, it should not be illegal.
Sponsor GIMP or any other competition if you don't like Adobe product.
If you think the competition is inferior in quality, well, now you know what you pay for.
The mass market is use to paying little up front and expect updates and fixes forever for that one time fee which of course is non sustainable, subscription software is/can be. I certainly hope we are not a place where something should be illegal because you disagree with one company/person. How is this on HackerNews?
> The mass market is use to paying little up front and expect updates and fixes forever for that one time fee which of course is non sustainable, subscription software is/can be.
Since every up-front price has an equivalent value to a certain ongoing permanent flow, this is nonsense. Now, it may be that the price/quality ratio the market supports with the will support with up-front pricing is too low for the downstream support expected while the subscription price that is supported is greater.
They did not expect updates or little fixes for software bought on a disk. What mostly broke that are necessary security updates for exploits, and newer platforms (Windows 7+ and Mac OS a little bit, but mostly mobile platforms) becoming unstable due to system updates. Most users still do not expect or want updates of any kind, they are pushed due to externalities (occasionally in the users best interest, e.g. security, and occasionally not, e.g. random corporately motivated redesigns)
In fairness it wasn’t always like this. People used to buy a box copy of SW for a fair price. then software shops started offering the $.99 app when app stores got into vogue. Now they want to migrate everyone to subscription models.
The definition of “mass market” changed hugely too from the shelved box software era to app stores, so much so that I’m not even sure how fair it is to compare anymore.
I’d argue that the majority of customers in the software market didn’t really evolve with the distribution model; phones arguably just expanded distribution to a great many people who previously weren’t software customers of any kind or rarely made software purchases at all (beyond that which came for “free” on their devices), many of whom appear to think paying for software in any fashion is almost unthinkable.
> many of whom appear to think paying for software in any fashion is almost unthinkable.
I still don't see how the fault lies with the customer. Look at all the software they get to use for free or cheap because the software shops made it available for free (with ads) or cheap ($.99 apps). This is not the customer's fault; they were trained to think this way.
It's the same with poor countries. I don't play games now, but when I was young and lived in Eastern Europe, by some miracle my mother brought me PS1 with one free game included for Christmas. The non pirate games cost about 50 dollars at the time. My middle class mother Made 250 a month...
I got the machine modded and bought few pirated games... It was impossible for us to afford originals.
Why is he talking about subscription software being illegal while also talking about how Adobe sucks? If he was happy with his subscription, I doubt he would have written this post. Yet, being happy with a subscription has a little to do on the morality of it.
Of course, no one actually thinks subscription software should be illegal. Maybe he's making a distinction between software that can operate offline and internet dependent software?
> I also think that paying once to OWN software should be practically a human right. It’s my operating system, my computer, and I don’t see why I should be renting part of it from some greedy little fuckwits.
It's not even your operating system, or computer. You can't do anything you want with them. For BSD, you have to keep the copyright, for Linux, you have to redistribute the source if you redistribute the binary, and for Windows you can't really do anything.
If he doesn't want any new Photoshop features, I'm sure he can find an old binary that works for free on the internet. Or he could just switch to something else.
> It's not even your operating system, or computer. You can't do anything you want with them. For BSD, you have to keep the copyright, for Linux, you have to redistribute the source if you redistribute the binary, and for Windows you can't really do anything.
That is clearly not what the author meant. The author means that pay-once software or free software, you can download it to your computer, then go live in a hut, and can do whatever you want there, with no restrictions being imposed on you from the software license. The restrictions only come about when you want to distribute (optionally modified) binaries or source code.
With subscription software, the restrictions come about even when you are in your hut, and you have to continue paying the software creator even if you are not interested in getting updates or using their cloud service (assuming it's possible for you to even run the software without connecting to their cloud service).
I am not saying anything about whether the latter is a just business model or, but your quoted point is definitely invalid.
Happy GIMP user here. GIMP is probably the most apparent "something else".
But talking to my friends who use Photoshop, apparently the learning curve of GIMP is too steep. It doesn't work the way Photoshop does, and so they don't use it. I find this odd.. they'd prefer to carry on paying hundreds of cash each year to use a buggy piece of software that they know, instead of using this awesome piece of software for free with the minimal investment of a few days learning. People are weird.
> It doesn't work the way Photoshop does, and so they don't use it.
It's not just the way it works. It simply does not have a lot of features present in Photoshop, starting with non-destructive filter layers. It's not just different, it's objectively worse to work with, because you can't adjust filters retroactively, wasting time to undo to the right place, then reapply everything.
If that works for you, great! But you're oversimplifying reasons it may not work for others.
Yes, when it comes down to it if money is on the line a few days of downtime can lead to thousands of dollars in lost time and work. Your friends are probably well aware of GIMP, made the calculation dozens of times, and each time decided it wasn’t worth the risk. It’s not just the learning curve. It’s a whole different workflow.
I learned photoshop in middle school. And if I resumed using it today not a lot would change. I’ve tried to learn Gimp for 2 decades. I still can’t figure out the GUI, CLI processing was easy, I get that.
So why is the GUI so hard to learn? I mean, I'm not a huge fan of it, I still find it tricky to do the right thing sometimes. But is it that much harder than PS?
I don't know what your friends professions are, but if photoshop is a regular part of it, then the productivity gains are worth the cost.
It's the same reason I pay for JetBrains IDEs. I've got friends who say why in the world would you pay for an IDE when you can do everything for free with VS Code. But my productivity is so much higher with pycharm + webstorm, so I pay.
And maybe I am weird, but I like to pay people for the work that they do that makes my life better.
>But talking to my friends who use Photoshop, apparently the learning curve of GIMP is too steep.
I'm a huge FOSS fan, so I don't say this as some sort of Adobe fanboy. GIMP has a lot of issues beyond the interface. Chief among them is a lack of nondestructive adjustment layers. That means it's a non-starter right off the bat for any photographer doing nonlinear postprocessing.
OK, I get that. But these aren't photographer friends. These are usually web designers doing some basic web layouts and graphic manipulation. I do this stuff in GIMP, and they refuse to.
This just strikes me as an angry rant post with a selfish premise. There is no consideration about the sustainability of a software business and why they tend to move towards subscription-bases. And consider how much value you are getting out of the tool.
Does $50/month for the tool that allows you to do your trade (and always having access to the latest features) really seem ridiculous? Seems like a fairly trivial business expense to me.
But if you don't like it, don't use premiere. There are plenty of options out there that aren't subscription only.