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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 a

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.

yvan-eht-nioj 7y ago
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.
- dinkleberg 7y ago
  You're not wrong there, I definitely agree about Adobe's business practices being shady. My main argument is against them saying that subscription software should be illegal.
  - chii 7y ago
    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.
    - ttoinou 7y ago
      then it's not a free-association relationship 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_Format https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Interchange_File_Form.... Please educate yourself little bit about the products you're criticizing
- ttoinou 7y ago
  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
- danShumway 7y ago
  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.
  - Finnucane 7y ago
    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.
  - naikrovek 7y ago
    The DMCA has a provision allowing that. It is explicitly legal to reverse engineer file formats for the purpose of interoperability.
  - chachachoney 7y ago
    >> 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.
  - tonyarkles 7y ago
    > 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.
- cpr 7y ago
  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.
situational87 7y ago
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.
- nathanaldensr 7y ago
  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.
  - ttoinou 7y ago
    Thank you for calling out the real cause of this issue. Greed. Let's make greed illegal
  - taffer 7y ago
    > Subscription models--rent-seeking--is a little peek into this reality. Thats not what rent seeking means.
    - valenciarose 7y ago
      Indeed. Charging fees for something you built is very nearly the opposite of rent-seeking.
- y_molodtsov 7y ago
  Stock buyback is just another form of dividends, taxed as capital gains if you do it right.
ac29 7y ago
> 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.
drcongo 7y ago
> 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"
- the_seraphim 7y ago
  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.
- dinkleberg 7y ago
  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.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

yvan-eht-nioj 7y ago

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.

dinkleberg 7y ago
You're not wrong there, I definitely agree about Adobe's business practices being shady. My main argument is against them saying that subscription software should be illegal.
- chii 7y ago
  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.
  - ttoinou 7y ago
    then it's not a free-association relationship 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_Format https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Interchange_File_Form.... Please educate yourself little bit about the products you're criticizing
ttoinou 7y ago
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
danShumway 7y ago
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.
- Finnucane 7y ago
  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.
- naikrovek 7y ago
  The DMCA has a provision allowing that. It is explicitly legal to reverse engineer file formats for the purpose of interoperability.
- chachachoney 7y ago
  >> 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.
- tonyarkles 7y ago
  > 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.
cpr 7y ago
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.

situational87 7y ago

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.

nathanaldensr 7y ago
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.
- ttoinou 7y ago
  Thank you for calling out the real cause of this issue. Greed. Let's make greed illegal
- taffer 7y ago
  > Subscription models--rent-seeking--is a little peek into this reality. Thats not what rent seeking means.
  - valenciarose 7y ago
    Indeed. Charging fees for something you built is very nearly the opposite of rent-seeking.
y_molodtsov 7y ago
Stock buyback is just another form of dividends, taxed as capital gains if you do it right.

ac29 7y ago

> 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.

drcongo 7y ago

> 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"

the_seraphim 7y ago
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.
dinkleberg 7y ago
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.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]