this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2024
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Among the most significant changes with this year’s Elements releases has little to do with new features but instead concerns the ways users purchase and own the software. While prior versions of Photoshop and Premiere Elements have been lifetime licenses — the user buys the software and then owns it indefinitely — this year’s release has moved to a three-year license term.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Genuine question: Why are Adobe clients not holding pitchforks and standing outside their offices every day for the past 2 years?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

I think, because most people who are actually relying on Adobe products (e.g. making money with them) are making way more than it costs (by several orders of magnitude) so they let themselves get slowly boiled because they still make money hand over fist.

Everytime there is a price increase, the discussion becomes: do we retrain x people, costing us y per person and reducing productivity for z months, or do we just take the L and pay a flat percent increase per seat and maintain productivity. The choice is almost always the second one because it's hard to predict how prices will increase in the future and the costs of retraining your staff.

The people not making money have no resources to stand up to Adobe, so they make noise because it's all they can do. Adobe ignores them because they don't generate a significant portion of their revenue.

If you are an employee for a company using Adobe products, it's likely you don't even care and you may not even be aware of the pricing scheme your company is following.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

There's another free video editor called shotcut. Give it a try, works great.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

There's also free and open source alternatives.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago (2 children)

why cant people just give up adobe and switch to davinci and affinity

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Ecosystems and collaboration. If you're already using Adobe for X and Y in your teams, it's cheaper to get a CC license; and as for collaboration Adobe files are proprietary (and tbh so are Affinity files) so it's harder to transition off of them. You can open .psd files in affinity, but wanting to export one will rasterize your text. And you can't even export a .ai file, sure you can do pdfs and that preserves vector information and layers, but that's just friction that businesses wouldn't want to deal with.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

oh that makes sense, VENDOR LOCK IN.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

At this point it's the only assed Adobe has. No one who uses Adobe software actually likes it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

FOSS projects are often worth their salt

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

i miss macromedia :(

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Remember, it's morally correct to pirate every single adobe product. Same goes for every Nintendo product

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It's also a major pain in the ass to do now. I forget how I did it last time, some fuck Adobe subreddit had a guide for it but it's so much more than just install and drop lolcrackorvirus.dll into the folder.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

Adobe used to house all the licensing mechanisms in a single file named amtlib.dll. The people who cracked it just nulled out the function. And since it was the same for every piece of software, just repeat the null process for each one. Bam, the entire suite for free.

When Adobe switched from CS to CC subscription, it was cracked in 24 hours. Largely because they didn't change much.

Adobe then axed the crippling DLL file and baked the mechanism right into the executable. A patcher tool was released that could crack each one. The upside is you could install and keep them updated from the CC Desktop and just run the patcher each time. Sometimes you had to wait for an update to the patcher. So before you clicked "update" you had to double check to make sure it worked.

To stop the free trial abuse (which is how people installed anyway) Adobe started requiring billing information during setup before you even get to downloads.

Later on, Adobe prevented users from updating apps if there wasn't an active subscription.

The patcher eventually stopped working because it was abandoned (this around 2019 when I gave up using it because Resolve and Affinity were more affordable and met my needs.) Months later someone else picked up the patcher development. There's also pre-cracked versions you can download and install.

I've not touched Adobe since and find Resolve to be significantly more stable and at $300, much more affordable. The Affinity Photo and Designer apps are great and affordable too at $170 for the bundle.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

Weird, just looking at my stats for 'adobe products pirated'. The line item listed just went from 0/lifetime to ~1 every 3 years.

I wonder if this will affect their profit margin.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 week ago (2 children)

There has to be a meaningful number of companies where each individually is spending more on adobe licenses than it would cost them to pay a bunch of developers to get gimp to the point where it is a fully sufficient alternative. But hey, the only thing more important to capitalists than making profit seems to be, to not go for cheaper FLOSS options, rather than spending pointlessly large amounts of money on proprietary software…

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

There is still the perception that it's too cheap to be good in many cases. I've run into this fairly recently. It's stupid, but it exists, and sometimes it exists in the people making the decisions.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

Feels like there's a very simple solution to that. "We can't use free software, you get what you pay for. We're not switching to GIMP." "Okay, what about Rasteditor? It costs $99/year." "Sounds good, get a license for everyone on the team." And Rasteditor is just a fork of GIMP with a different logo and the subscription model just donates to the GIMP project.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

A lot of FOSS projects have succeeded in approximately this way. I think it can only be a matter of time until this happens even in this area.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (2 children)

That's why I'm a little skeptical when buying lifetime licenses.

I love my Plex server and even pay for Plex pass, would love to buy lifetime. But what if two weeks after I buy they just decide this isn't their business model anymore?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago

They cannot change the terms of a license without reserving themselves the right to do so which would be a red flag, this is in reference to future sales of the license for this software.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

Isn't Plex FOSS and you only need to pay for the extras? You don't need PlexPass.

I did buy the lifetime almost 15 years ago. I'm pretty happy with my purchase.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Good to know! Everyone says so many good things about it, I might just buy it myself

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

Plex is not FOSS. But I am with you. I bought Plex pass about 10 years ago and still use it daily

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It looks like the media player is open source, but the media server is not.

I also bought the lifetime license a while ago, and am also happy with that purchase.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Ah, I guess that shows my ignorance. Thanks.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 week ago

And then once this move has had enough to time to narrow their userbase to only the ones dumb enough to tolerate such bullshit, they'll do it again because number go up lol

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