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You can no longer reinstall CS 2 or 3 even if you have the original disks
- grecy 6y ago> You can no longer reinstall Creative Suite 2 or 3 even if you have the original installation disks. The aging activation servers for those apps had to be retired. I always wonder if a situation like this is legal. If I purchased a product and want to keep using it, what right does the seller have to prevent me from doing so x years later? Can I sue them for not selling me the product they said they were selling me?
- dheera 6y agoMaybe someone can crack the code to not require activation? You did purchase the software after all, and unless you are illegally distributing it I see it as a perfectly fine thing to do whatever you want within your own private residence.
- foobar1962 6y ago> You did purchase the software after all Err, umm, no. You purchased a license to use the software.
- lsiebert 6y agoNot really? If you have the disks, you bought a copy of it, just like you bought a copy of a book, not a license to read it's pages.
- manquer 6y agoModifying the binary is not same as copying . Also given thay Adobe has failed to their side of the agreement, there is some legal standing. Ofcourse it has to be tested in court, unlikely Adobe will even sue if they knew. I don't think they care one way or another. And the customer using cs2 still is unlikely to sue as it's not going to be a large enterprise. This is just laziness from Adobe , older servers take effort to maintain. They could be using keys that have expired to be signing the auth request for example.
- dheera 6y agoIt's a very long bytearray. You own a CPU. Because you own that CPU, you get to play gatekeeper and decide which parts of that bytearray go to your CPU and which ones don't. That's not for Adobe to decide. The bytearray they send you is just a suggestion of what to run on your CPU. They provided you a suggestion in return for a payment. You don't have to run all of that suggestion. You can selectively run parts of it.
- dylan604 6y agoWhat hardware are you running that old crap code on anyways? If you are in the video world today, those old versions of software can't even handle HD let alone 4K/8K. I couldn't even imagine trying to run RAW video without GPU support. Why are people so clinging on to software that only allows work from 10-15 years ago? Times have progressed. The old software doesn't support anything I need it to today (maybe I could get by with an old version of PS except for today's RAW formats would bring it to its knees).
- lmm 6y agoNonsense. The disks are your property and you're entitled to use them as you see fit (except when that use is illegal e.g. copyright infringement - and note that copyright does not cover the transitory copies made as part of running the application).
- smnrchrds 6y ago> The disks are your property and you're entitled to use them as you see fit I guess you can use them as frisbees.
- dheera 6y agoI run my life by morals, not by law, but with a risk tolerance bounded by the effects of law. That said, my moral interpretation of closed-source software is that I can do whatever the hell I want with it as long as I'm not distributing it to others without permission. Anything that enters my private residence, whether it be a CD I may have bought, or a very long byte array that got transmitted into my internal LAN in return for a payment, is fair game for me to do anything I want with, as long as it doesn't reach anyone outside.
- ChrisLomont 6y agoDid you accept the agreement when installing?
- PrinceKropotkin 6y ago...does anyone? Is that humanly possible to read through without a law degree? What do you do if you want to negotiate? The answer, of course, is piracy: reject all terms.
- ZenPsycho 6y agoyou can't sign away your rights, doubly so for legally dubious software checkmark agreements.
- cosmotic 6y agoThe terms of the CS6 license pertaining to activation don't indicate one way or the other what happens if the server was intentionally disabled by Adobe's choice. The only stated requirement is internet access; there's an implied requirement that no firewall is in place to prevent the software from communicating with the Adobe server.
- ChrisLomont 6y agoThe CS6 license [1] has a 90 day limited warranty in section 6, which, for most goods, means the items will work as intended for at least 90 days, otherwise you can return it for a full refund. It it fails after 90 days, then you generally cannot. Also, did CS6 stop working? The only stories I see are CS2 and CS3. [1] https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/cc/en/legal/licenses-terms/pdf/CS6.pdf https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/cc/en/legal/licenses-terms...
- cosmotic 6y agoNo, I have no reason to believe CS6 stopped working, that's just the only terms I have on my local and I couldn't find an obvious archive of Adobes terms for previous versions.
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- jyrkesh 6y agoThere may be some part of the law that prevents you from suing (IANAL), but if it wasn't disclosed before you purchased it, it make intuitive sense to me that you should have grounds to sue. I felt the same way about the whole Sonos recyling thing too...
- 542458 6y agoI think any competent lawyer would argue that the software was never guaranteed to have infinite lifespan, and Adobe stopped selling CS3 quite a while ago. The EULA explicitly says they don’t warranty anything past 90 days since sale. But regardless of that, your damages would be limited to what you spent on the license. So definitely not worth your time.
- Thorrez 6y ago>But regardless of that, your damages would be limited to what you spent on the license. So definitely not worth your time. But it could be a class action suit, and if you're the class representative you can get larger compensation.
- schoolornot 6y agoIf you sue Adobe over this they will likely settle over the phone. If you really want to be a jerk, don't settle and make them send a lawyer out to your district. I'm not encouraging any fraud here but if you feel ripped off, a small claims case is totally in order, here. And they normally take about 10 minutes to file for online.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago> But regardless of that, your damages would be limited to what you spent on the license. So definitely not worth your time. Class action perhaps? Or small claims at the other end?
- hajile 6y agoDon't forget all the time spent learning the beast that is CS3 only to have it stripped away. What is the value of the years it takes to become proficient with such software? Remember, that investment was made on the back of the idea that the software would continue to be usable.
- twblalock 6y agoYou didn’t own it. You licensed it.
- save_ferris 6y agoI’m sure there’s a provision that protects them in the EULA you agreed to when you purchased it. Isn’t it a moot point anyway because nobody ever “buys” software, they just obtain a license to use it. Ownership is such a convoluted concept in tech, particularly in software.
- Retric 6y agoThat’s somewhat sketchy with pre boxed software. Old Nintendo cartridges just worked and presumably had zero copyright issues. If you’re buying/using hardware with software preinstalled, at what point did you agreed to the EULA?
- peeters 6y agoI'm glad you qualified "old", because I tried to run some Switch games from the cartridge when I was at a cottage with no connectivity, and both games forbade me from playing without updating first.
- StillBored 6y agoThis is what kills me about the xbone, games come on disks, but immediately want to call home before allowing play. Game calls home, and realizes it needs a 8GB patch! Proceeds to download patch at 500Kb/sec on my 100's of Mbit/sec internet connection. Then despite probably "authenticating" itself to the xbone, won't actually run unless the disk is in the drive. (don't get me started on how bad the UI is, I really haven't any idea why gamers love those little machines so much, they are mostly just trash).
- ImprobableTruth 6y ago>Isn’t it a moot point anyway because nobody ever “buys” software, they just obtain a license to use it. Well, depends on the country. In Germany that's not a thing because contract law doesn't allow it. Either you buy software or you rent it.
- DoreenMichele 6y agoLaws change from place to place and time to time. It might be legal in one place but not another. It might be legal at one time but not another. The devil is in the details.
- dylan604 6y agoWhy are they running physical servers for this anyways? Why not just host in the cloud right next to their current servers authenticating recent rental software?
- __john 6y agoSeems like a case for piracy.
- abraae 6y ago"The aging activation servers for those apps had to be retired." Cry me a river - Adobe can't afford to keep an old server running? At least be honest about the motivation.
- eli 6y agoRelease a patch to remove the check and you don’t need to worry about it.
- SoylentYellow 6y agoThis should be a requirement enforced by legislation.
- paledot 6y agoTruly. Also, if your device depends on a cloud service to function, you must open-source the service if you choose to EOL it.
- zamalek 6y agoIANAL, it is now abandonware and can be legally cracked (legislation past year or two).
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoI’m also not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure that’s not a thing, at least in the US. Downloading/distributing abandonware is still piracy, it’s just much less likely anyone will care.
- zamalek 6y agoI remember The Internet Archive celebrating the fact that the "do not tamper" clause was no longer legal for abandonware (as they host tons of abandonware that has been cracked, e.g. Win 95). But I could be wrong.
- BuildTheRobots 6y agoI discovered this at the start of lockdown when our hackspace got donated some older iMacs and full copies of CS3. Apparently if you got in contact with them when they first announced the retirement they were giving out activation-free installers to people who could prove ownership. It'd be lovely if someone has these archived somewhere for those of us that weren't quick enough.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Lammy 6y agoIt'd be lovely if you had contact information in your profile ;)
- ajxs 6y ago...just thought I'd mention here that I have my contact information in mine.
- firecall 6y ago... and I always make sure mine is in my profile too! You know... just in case!
- asmosoinio 6y agoActually it's not, you need to add it to your about text for it to be visible. See https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=firecall https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=firecall in an incognito browser window.
- BuildTheRobots 6y agohave just updated it - <hacker-news-handle>@gmail.com :) You have the potential to make a couple of our more creative members extremely happy :)
- StanislavPetrov 6y agoOne of several reasons I will never purchase anything from Adobe or any other company that requires remote activation or "cloud" services.
- ddmma 6y agoThey should specify from the start but would not sell that much .. what happened to the good ol’ internet ?!
- crb002 6y agoLink to Ghidra of the network nanny?
- insiderinsider 6y agoProbably offer a free version of creative cloud for people with cs2
- monkin 6y agoWhoa. Business thinking right there... but seriously why should they?
- sn41 6y agoWhat happens to digitally signed PDF documents 10 years from now? Will they no longer be valid/legally openable?
- icebraining 6y agoPDF files are an ISO standard (including the digital signing part), so that should be fine.
- sn41 6y agoBut who authenticates the digital signatures? I am under the impression that these are certified by Adobe.
- TillE 6y agoPDF signing should be pretty standard PKI stuff. If you have Adobe's public certs you're good.
- PeterisP 6y agoIn general, digital signatures should always be cryptographically verifiable by the receiver without anyone's cooperation - certification by someone may be required to make the signature (especially if you'd want the signature to include a trusted timestamp), but everyone else in perpetuity can verify if a signature was certified by someone even if that certifier does not exist anymore.
- mortenjorck 6y agoI don't have the original license agreements handy to determine whether this is the case, but I'm guessing the following are true: 1) Customers "agree" to binding arbitration 2) Adobe reserves the right to terminate your ability to install the software at any time If the above are not true, however, this seems like a nice target for an entrepreneurial class action lawyer. Of course, what we really need are some vastly better digital consumer protection laws.
- 542458 6y agoThe original EULA doesn’t say those things (CS3 was before the era where everything had an arbitration agreement stapled to it), but does say that the software is only warrantied for 90 days and that that is the only warranty you get unless you have a support contract. https://labs.adobe.com/technologies/eula/photoshopcs3.html https://labs.adobe.com/technologies/eula/photoshopcs3.html
- nitrogen 6y agoI'd bet there's some other law that applies when a product ceases functioning because it was, in a way, sabotaged by the manufacturer.
- ragnak 6y agoLook at "planned obsolescence": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence
- hajile 6y agoEven with arbitration, tons and tons of arbitrations cases can hurt even large businesses. To be clear though, arbitration where the employer chooses and pays (pays off really) the firm in question seems the definition of a conflict of interest and a one-sided contract that should be thrown out.
- thrwn_frthr_awy 6y agoEULAs in boxed software were always strange to begin with. You could not return opened software so if you purchased something like CS 2 on disc and didn’t like the terms there was nothing you could do. The agreements were not always enforceable unless the terms were stated on the box or a refund option was provided (which rarely was for fear of piracy).
- walrus01 6y agoAlexa, show me how to drive a significant portion of your customer base towards unashamed piracy.
- Shared404 6y agoOr better yet, an open source alternative. I like both GIMP and Krita. The problem with piracy is that it still ends up with more people knowing the proprietary software, and thus helps it keep the position cemented.
- Grakel 6y agoPhotopea.com is exactly like photoshop, it's free, web based or download!
- Shared404 6y agoThat's definitely a good choice for those used to Photoshop, I can barely use PS now, so it's probably not a good fit for me. Anything to pull from PS's dominance is good though!
- mjrpes 6y agoThis is pretty amazing, so glad you posted it. It has layer blending options and shadow/highlights, two feature I can't live without and are often missing in free editors. The menus are exactly like photoshop. And finally an API that lets you save/load PSD/images to and from cloud storage.
- Grakel 6y agoYeah it's one guy's project, and he is a monster. Check out the reddit AMA if you get a chance.
- noobermin 6y agoI mean this is the same trap, one day the website won't be around, then what will you do?
- zaptheimpaler 6y agoyay piracy! its always a fast and simple recourse even if the legal system isn't.
- paledot 6y agoThis will be remembered as a dark age of humanity. Anything built or released in the early 21st century will simply become meaningless bytes to future generations.
- mikeyouse 6y agoI had this thought when watching a cold-case show awhile back. The detectives had dug out the original cassette tapes which helped "crack the case" - what are modern police departments doing? Hopefully this stuff isn't just in the cloud somewhere waiting to get lost? In 20 years will we have any ability whatsoever to recreate everything from today?
- manquer 6y agoLegally perhaps, most of these earlier software had plenty of cracks to bypass the early copy protection they used.
- xtracto 6y agoJust think about the 1990s internet. Geocities is gone, xoom is gone Yahoo pages is gone. There's already a hole of all of the content that existed the. Sure for some people it might just be senseless 13 year olds' pages, but it is a big chunk of history right there.
- mjrpes 6y agoI thought back in 2013 Adobe made a download available for Creative Suite 2 that did not require an activation server for install: https://www.cnet.com/news/adobe-releases-creative-suite-2-for-free/ https://www.cnet.com/news/adobe-releases-creative-suite-2-fo... However it looks like this download is not available anymore.
- userbinator 6y agoIt's available in the web archive, among other places.
- zakki 6y agoI tried yo search one of the link from CNET news in archive.org. It said archived is removed (per request)
- userbinator 6y agoYou need to search for the filenames and direct links. I have an old comment here linking to a different archive that has the original direct links on the page with the serials. (Adobe is certainly trying to make it hard to find, which I'm not surprised about.)
- jayp1418 6y agoThat's why prefer Open source applications :D
- platz 6y agoswitch to Gimp
- Shared404 6y agoOr Krita, depending on your usecase.
- Grakel 6y agoPhotopea.com
- jart 6y ago> switch to Gimp How is this comment grayed out? I just scrolled past like eight pages of bozos shamelessly talking about pirating Adobe, suing Adobe, and regulating Adobe... before finally finding a comment I can respect, and it's downmodded. I mean, is this Hacker News or is it Russian Hacker News?
- stackreality 6y agoAnd you can no longer use the 2008 version of Gmail. Adobe moved to a subscription model that has allowed them to stay alive as a business without monetizing you as the product like many other ad based businesses. Adobe gets trashed endlessly for this because we had a taste of the perpetual license long ago. But the perpetual license doesn't make sense with cloud based updates and document sync that everyone also expects in modern digital tools. Imagine creating software today with perpetual licenses but no updates or sync across devices. You would laugh it off your machine.
- manquer 6y agoHowever , their sale terms for cs2 did not say you can pay a lot of money to use till Adobe changrs their mind. Their license agreement said I can use as long as I wanted to
- stackreality 6y agoThey didn't pull the software off your computer. They stopped hosting the box, but you probably bought it at Best Buy and still have it laying around!
- Shared404 6y ago> Even with the original install disks The quoted sentence is what people are bothered by. The program is still lying around on a disk, but cannot be used legally.
- Shared404 6y ago> And you can no longer use the 2008 version of Gmail. How is this relevant? Gmail has always been a remotely hosted service. This is about Photoshop CS, not CC. And I do not expect old software to do cloud updates/document sync. I expect it to keep working as is. I also can't stand the endless "Needs connectivity" and "Set up syncing now" in modern software.
- abraae 6y ago> And you can no longer use the 2008 version of Gmail. Gmail has always been a hosted service - not software that runs entirely on your own machine. Apples and oranges. > Imagine creating software today with perpetual licenses but no updates or sync across devices. You would laugh it off your machine. You mean like any number of extremely popular software packages like IntelliJ that offer perpetual licenses?
- Lammy 6y agoThere are special no-activation-required versions of the entire CS2 and CS3 product line! Adobe killed the product activation servers for CS2 products in 2013, and for CS3 products in 2017. For CS2, they offered Activation-free replacement installers and generic serial numbers on their support page. This resulted in a bunch of press[0] about it being a /!\ omg completely free Creative Suite /!\, so for CS3's 2017 shutdown[1] they made you register your original serials to your Adobe Account in exchange for an individualized offline serial and the offline installer[2]. I don't know exactly when, but some time around the end of 2019 or the beginning of 2020 they ended[3] the offline installer program for CS3, removed the ability to generate offline serials in my Adobe Account page or even re-access the offline downloads for my already-generated serials, and have seemingly scrubbed their Knowledge Base of any mention that they ever existed. I am so thankful I got them while I was able to since aside from needing to tweak the high-DPI handling[4] the CS3 apps work beautifully on my Windows 10 x64 machine. All CS3 applications are only 32-bit, but they're also the final versions with traditional UIs before they gave everything a shiny new Flash-based UI in CS4, so I'm fine with it :) [0]: https://nofilmschool.com/2013/01/adobe-releases-creative-suite-online-completely-free https://nofilmschool.com/2013/01/adobe-releases-creative-sui... [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190401002548/https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-suite/kb/activation-fails-cs3-acrobat-8.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190401002548/https://helpx.ado... [2]: https://i.imgur.com/ae1SWN5.png https://i.imgur.com/ae1SWN5.png (my screenshot!) [3]: https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop/locked-photoshop-cs3-activation-cs3-is-dead/m-p/10861805?page=3 https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop/locked-photoshop-cs... [4]: https://i.imgur.com/OjBggBb.png https://i.imgur.com/OjBggBb.png
- imposterr 6y agoThank you for this timeline. I was trying to figure out what had happened to the CS2/CS3 pages and downloads a bit ago and there was no info!
- alister 6y agoThat was an excellent summary of Adobe's software giveaway. Are you sure that the replacement serial numbers are individualized? When I tried googling, some of my replacement serial numbers are found on the web, some aren't. This seems to suggest that they are not individualized -- at least for some product & platform combinations. My own theory about the motivation of the original giveaway is that they lost the ability to generate new licenses for those old versions, so they made it free. A comment[1] from 3 years ago: How could they lose the ability to create licenses? I can think of many scenarios: The one server that ran the legacy license code crashed, and they had no backups. Or they lost the database of who had which product and serial number, so there was no way to verify anything when someone needed to reactivite an old product or move their license to a different system. Or there was a new bug or incompatibility in their license generator, perhaps due to a server upgrade, but the source code for the licensing software was lost so there was no way to rebuild it.[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15732354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15732354
- savant_penguin 6y agoJust swap "Adobe cs2" for a car so it gets a lot funnier >>Sir, you are no longer allowed to use your car >But I paid for it! It's my car! >>Our aging servers had to be retired >Can't you just turn off the checking so it won't cost you anything and I can keep using my car? >>No sir, without the checking people would start pirating the car > But you don't even sell this car anymore! So much so you don't even want to keep the servers online! >>I'm sure you'll love the new model we are selling > I don't need a new car! I already have one, fuck off! I'm just gonna use a crack >> Sir it's illegal to run unauthorized software on your car
- 0xcde4c3db 6y agoNot bad; I think I switched to Mitchell and Webb voices about halfway through (cf. [1]) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E
- ArtDev 6y agoYes, this is the exact issue!
- userbinator 6y agoI could see this happening with Teslas in the future...
- chongli 6y agoIt sounds absurd now but I wouldn’t be surprised if cars are locked down like that at some point. Just look at the stuff Tesla does all the time.
- LeonB 6y agoObviously they can't turn the car off while you're driving, so they'll perform these checks either when you stop the car or when you start it. The solution then is to never ever stop the car. And you may also need to fool the onboard gps and vision systems into believing the car is moving. So in the future, a crappy old car will need to be left running 24 hours a day, in an augmented reality garage that fools the car into thinking it is on a long journey. I would like to write a science fiction story from the point of view of a sentient car in that situation. But I have to write my code instead.
- tbirdny 6y agoNo one would still be using CS 2 or 3 if Adobe had reasonable prices on new products. I bought Adobe products since the mid 1990s, but I recently switched to Affinity Photo and Designer because Adobe priced me out. Elements wasn't powerful enough for me. I was surprised how good Affinity software is. It does everything I need and is a very reasonable price without a subscription. I may never buy another Adobe product. Adobe is so foolish for giving their competitors an opening. They are giving away their business.
- Lammy 6y agoThe old non-Flash Photoshop CS3 UI is really nice and familiar to me, so I still willingly use it almost every day. My needs definitely aren't Pro Tier, but it's great for cleaning up my scans: https://i.imgur.com/WWXiUFI.png https://i.imgur.com/WWXiUFI.png
- maxerickson 6y ago$600 a year isn't particularly expensive (that's for Creative Cloud). Roughly $0.30 an hour vs whatever wage is being paid to click the buttons. It's not cheap, but it's not something businesses are going to balk at either. They are showing healthy growth in revenue: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ADBE/financials?p=ADBE https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ADBE/financials?p=ADBE So apparently lots of their users are not concerned about their change to the pricing model and increased cost of use?
- underwater 6y agoIt's cheap for professional use, but it's very expensive for amateurs and occasional users. I was using Lightroom to manage my catalogue of photos. I'd open up Photoshop and Lightroom maybe a dozen times a year. It was nice to have them available but they were effectively costing me $20 each use. When Adobe products were an upfront payment I could choose to buy a product and keep it through multiple release cycles, which would reduce my cost. Adobe have switched their revenue driver from improving the product and introducing new must-have features to making churn painful. In fact when I tried to cancel my ~4 year old subscription they decided charged me a penalty fee because it wasn't done immediately before my account's anniversary. Their incentives are now strongly misaligned with building a good customer experience.
- rubyfan 6y agoThis is a fundamental problem with commercial software. 15 years ago when this software was released the choice to have server authentication essentially was the original sin.
- tpmx 6y agoNo, it's a fundamental problem with Adobe software.
- rnd0 6y agoIt's a problem that is not limited to Adobe, and is a by-product of their commercial nature. The need for artificial scarcity (in this instance really really artificial) .
- fsflover 6y agoNo, it's a fundamental problem with proprietary software: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24831699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24831699
- flyinghamster 6y agoSee also, Windows and activation. Adding that to XP was where Microsoft began to boil the frog, and now they're slowly doing to Office what Adobe did to CS.
- interestica 6y agoI seriously think this was the last straw for Adobe and I. I just wanted to install an older version of an app (that I've paid for!) on an older computer. I've literally spent thousands of dollars on software that I can no longer use for no reason other than that they will no longer allow me to. The worst part seems to be that they've just killed links and information about this - so you have people presuming they can reinstall their own products only to find they cannot -- and their online searches of adobe-run knowledgebases are just dead ends.
- tapland 6y agoI see people running OSX Lion to run newer CS versions than CS3 because they can’t be installed on operating systems that have gotten security updates in the last five years. =\
- dylan604 6y agoWhat version of OSX was Lion? Snow Leopard 10.6 was the last one for the original cheese graters, and I know plenty of people running those and Final Cut 7 systems. It ain't broke, so they ain't fixin'. It's older SD tape based work flows that just ingest content from tape all day long, and then places it on the SAN for others workflows.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoLion is 10.7, one after Snow Leopard. I’m not sure why you’d run 10.7 instead of either 10.6 or 10.8 (or 10.9) btw. Lion is buggier than the adjacent releases (which are really solid).
- swiley 6y agoLion was the last version of OSX that I ran. After having my hard drive corrupted twice by it I gave up and put Debian on my macbook.
- 6y ago
- egonschiele 6y agoIn the last month I've returned two pieces of Adobe software and canceled a yearly subscription. I've been seeing ads for the AI features in photoshop all over twitter this week. It's pretty clear what their business strategy is -- just keep working on the tech and assume people will buy their software because it's the only one with the hot tech thing. It's ironic that for a company that caters to designers, artists and product folks, all their products have such poor UI. And there's no incentive for Adobe to care. The difference between Adobe and Procreate is night and day. It's so clear that Procreate folks use their app themselves and take pleasure in it. I've switched all my work to Procreate, Affinity, and Final Cut.
- henriquez 6y agoSpeaking of UI, I’ve been using Photoshop since 1999 and it’s remarkable how little the UI has changed. Sure there are new panels and features, but the basic layout and most of the keyboard shortcuts are all the same. The consistency and familiarity is really nice but I’m sure they’ve sacrificed a ton of UX potential to keep old farts like me.
- gibolt 6y agoChanging the UI would raise so much uproar. Millions of workflows would have to change. In addition, it just does so much that changing it would be a very costly task likely to break a lot of things and end up removing features that some tiny niche still uses.
- mdip 6y agoThat's it. I didn't even really use Photoshop in a professional capacity, but it's probably worse in that situation. In the past, if you wanted to do something "cool looking" on the web, you'd describe to Google something you saw and invariably land on some Photoshop tutorial. It doesn't translate to other things easily. So to switch to something like GIMP, you have to not only learn the interface, but learn how to translate all of the useful help "in the wild" from Photoshop to GIMP. I remember when I sat down to try to learn paths and such in Photoshop, thinking, "Is this really the best they could come up with?" But, yeah, it was ... when they came up with it and everyone learned how to use it. A switch would eliminate the moat that the product has. And that's what's been chipped away at, in general. I haven't had any need of Photoshop for web dev work in a long time. My image processing needs rarely go beyond the command-line, these days, because many other things we relied on PS for are described in css or are vectors rather than image files.
- olliej 6y agoSo time for a refund right?
- rlayton2 6y agoYou can probably get a full refund in Australia, as the product is no longer fit for purpose. I'm not sure how easy it would be to get the money though.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoReally? Australia mandates a 12+ year warranty?
- rlayton2 6y agoThere is no time limit in law. If its a physical good, it is expected that it degrades over time, so you can't take, say, your washing machine back after that period of time and demand your money back. Further, the law doesn't dictate that updates are required, or anything like that, so if CS3 doesn't work on Windows 10, thats not Adobe's fault. However, if you can show that it no longer works on a system it used to work on, then the product is not fit for purpose.
- rlayton2 6y agoI should also add, that I don't know how all that bull "you aren't buying a product, you are buying a license" stuff plays into it. It might render what I've just said as wrong the case of software.
- ArtDev 6y agoI own Photoshop CS4 but I couldn't get it working on Wine Linux so I feel fully justified in using a pirated "Portable" copy. This is what happens when companies don't support their own products.
- daniellarusso 6y agoI have been using Pixelmator Pro as a Photoshop substitute on OS X. I have been pretty happy with it, but I would be happy with Photoshop 7. What alternatives exist for ‘After Effects’, though?
- thewebcount 6y agoApple's Motion can do most stuff After Effects can do and many tricks it can't. Plus it's really nice not having to do RAM previews or renders. Just playback and it works! Is Autodesk Combustion still around? That was another competitor of theirs back in the day.
- daniellarusso 6y agoMotion is only $49. Nice.
- uxcolumbo 6y agoTry Davinci Resolve https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/fusion https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/fus...
- daniellarusso 6y ago$299, very reasonable.
- the-dude-abides 6y agoSemi-related: tried using Adobe XD once to practice UI graphic design and apparently they wont support windows 10 ltsb. Loyal Figma customer now.
- firefoxd 6y agoIt's 2020, the ipad is 10 years old. It was a revolutionary product. Some people stood in line for hours to be the first to own it. Well that reminds me, i do own one! Get it out of the closet and ah, the battery is depleted. Who expects it to hold charge after... 8 years? I don't have a cable either. I have lightning though, even usb-c. But nope, it's the old 30 pin charger. Order it online. Still works! Except, I haven't successfully managed to download a single app. It hangs forever. Same thing for itunes.
- sushshshsh 6y agoThats some pretty horrific shit considering I have dot com era machines lying around still running fine
- rvense 6y agoI have a 1991 Macintosh with some expansion cards that I use for making music. It still works perfectly.
- mcv 6y agoI should see if we can still start my dad's old 1984 Acorn Electron and then play the original Elite.
- whatch 6y agoMy original PSP is not as impressive. But when I found it a couple of months ago I really enjoyed flOw and NFS: Underground Rivals from 2008 or so.
- rangibaby 6y agoI remember the OG iPad had a pathetic amount of RAM, so that might be your issue; I use my iPad3 (2012) for Netflix and light browsing and it works great. The battery even holds plenty of charge. The App Store and Apple Music work fine. The YouTube app stopped working because the app demands an update that Google didn’t make available for that generation of iPad. Watching YT via Safari still works. My only complaint is that adblockers don’t work because that generation of iPad doesn’t have a 64bit CPU.
- esalman 6y agoI am getting through grad school using photopea.com for all raster needs. For vector graphics I just use python- the figures are reproducible now in addition to my research results.
- chrischen 6y agoI’ve been using photopea.com for basic editing and it’s pretty amazing how good it is considering it’s completely browser based. The UI is based off of photoshop.
- potency 6y ago> The aging activation servers for those apps had to be retired. Oh come on. Surely a company with the resources of Adobe can figure out a way to keep an activation server running. In fact I'll bet you could find one competent sysadmin to keep it running indefinitely. I hate when companies spew out obvious utter B.S. like this.
- kristopolous 6y agoCS3 was in 2007. It's not like we're talking about an IBM 709 here. It's probably a Core 2 Duo or a Clovertown Xeon. Give me a break. When producing digital goods you never want to be in a position where honest people who want to pay you money will get a better customer experience by going through thepiratebay.
- Jolter 6y agoThe hardware doesn’t really matter, does it? You clone the setup into a VM and stash it away somewhere on your massive corporate cloud and. I’m sure a very small machine could handle the minuscule amounts of activation traffic for the legacy versions.
- azalemeth 6y agoBut that's almost always the case with these companies. The fundamental problem with DRM is that it inconveniences paying customers: pirates get a better product after solving a fun puzzle game, and the rest of us get shafted.
- aaron695 6y agoWhat would you think it would cost per year? What $ amount? What would be the break down? Legacy software, security and the constant upgrades, a manager, HR, customer support. Training your all your call centres to know about it and who to re-direct issues to.
- seg_lol 6y agoPennies
- harikb 6y agoAdobe CS3 is about 10+ years old right?. I can see people blaming Adobe if they did provide a 10 yr old software without security updates. Talking about software that no longer works, I tried network recovery on a 2016 Mac. 2016 Mac is programmed to download only Mojave. And Mojave can't be installed on a Mac that had Catalina at some point in the past (even after a complete disk wipe). It took me a whole day to find another Mac, download offline installer, buy a new USB stick (because the installer was a bit over 8G) and get it reinstalled.
- lsiebert 6y agoAFAIK, nobody is making 0 days for 10 year old desktop software that doesn't usually connect to the internet. I guess maybe you could craft a malicious image file and target a specific person's computer if you were a state level actor, but seems rather unlikely.
- shmerl 6y agoStick to DRM-free tools.
- StillBored 6y agoI've been a firm believer that copyrights should expire when the item isn't commercially available anymore. And to keep people from abusing the obvious issues, it needs to be available at a reasonable cost relative to its price when originally released, or the copyright renewal needs to have an exponentially growing fee. I've also been considering what it means if copyright was to assure something for the public good whether there shouldn't be some kind of enforced escrow of the source. Having the copyright expire on the binaries does nothing if no one hid a copy of the source away in their shoebox.
- CamperBob2 6y agoIt's outrageous that copyright protection applies to DRM-encumbered material. Simply outrageous. Copyright is supposed to be a bargain with the public domain, and DRM explicitly renounces that bargain. This is a great example to point to... but as usual, nobody cares who has any power to change things, and nobody with any power cares.
- fsflover 6y agoJoin campaigns against DRM https://www.eff.org/issues/drm https://www.eff.org/issues/drm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defective_by_Design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defective_by_Design
- Silhouette 6y agoAs ever, this would be a more compelling argument if the state that granted copyright protections also provided meaningful enforcement. Setting copyright up in a way that often makes it prohibitively expensive to enforce through legal means and then objecting when the rights holders attempt to protect their investments through technological measures feels a little hypocritical.
- CamperBob2 6y agoThere should be a choice: either the legal system protects your IP (copyright), or you do (DRM). You shouldn't get the benefits of both approaches, because they are mutually exclusive. Material that is protected with DRM has effectively been stolen from the future public domain. At the very least, key escrow should be required before copyright protection is granted.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoI stopped using Adobe software long ago, once they moved subscription. That being said, keygens for CS3 probably still work fine since they generated activation codes too, and if you own it legally, you're probably well in the clear to use a keygen to activate it in the case Adobe won't.
- sneak 6y agoIf you’re tired of this like me, Blackmagic Design sells their editing/postproduction/color suite Davinci Resolve for a one-time purchase price, no subscription. Pixelmator is a lovely replacement for Photoshop, too.
- Animats 6y agoI was, however, able to install Adobe/Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS from the original install disks with the original serial numbers. On Windows 7, some update broke SFTP, and I had to give up on it on Windows. SFTP works fine under Wine. So I can maintain some old sites created with Dreamweaver.
- johncalvinyoung 6y agoMakes me sad. CS3 Production Premium Collection was my first, long-desired Creative Suite product, bought in high school with my summer's earnings to support my burgeoning filmmaking projects. Cut a bigger film that next winter using Premiere & After Effects and won some smalltime awards. Good times, so long ago. I have Creative Cloud now, and have had for years, but still, that little bit of my history is now just memories. I still have my CS6 environment, so they'd better not kill those activation servers anytime soon!
- hardwaresofton 6y agohttps://www.gimp.org https://www.gimp.org https://krita.org/en https://krita.org/en If you donate anything near what you would have paid for Adobe, then these projects will be awash in resources.
- jeffbee 6y agoThat's a really interesting assertion. I have a feeling you could throw arbitrary amount of money at GIMP and it will still be almost useless.
- hardwaresofton 6y ago> awash in resources
- Theodores 6y agoBy 'almost useless' you mean 'almost useless to someone expecting an open source clone of the leading proprietary software'. We all too often look at open source software and think of it as a clone of an 'equivalent'. Journalists and others lead us to believe that the likes of the GIMP team are striving to create a clone of Photoshop, or that the Inkscape team are striving to create a version of Illustrator or that the OpenOffice team are playing catchup with Microsoft Office. If you are a developer with basic image manipulation needs and some specific needs such as being able to save files to a specific colour depth in a specific format, then GIMP is what you want. Admittedly you are not going to be able to do the things a designer does in Photoshop but that is not the point. Same with OpenOffice Calc, it is a spreadsheet program but not a clone of Excel. It has a different demographic of users, some of whom would consider Excel to be the wrong tool as it magically autocorrects and thinks it knows best, with an interface that obfuscates important (to the programmer) details file save options. Inkscape - the alleged open source clone of Illustrator is not that at all. It is an editor for SVG files and is a better tool than Illustrator for that specific task of creating optimised SVG files. You can do some design with it too, but it has technical applications and a user base that prefer it because it caters to their needs. Some people that are used to the market leading software come with preconceptions about what free and open source software is about and how the user interfaces should be improved. Meanwhile, long time users of the open source software, can be mightily relieved that their chosen software is different to what the majority thinks is better.
- adamredwoods 6y agoThere are people that used to rely on this software as a means of an income: graphic designers, production designers, animators, illustrators, the list goes on. For a company to have such a grip on their means of living seems a bit harsh. I have great respect for the software, but not a high regard for the way it is sold. I can only hope that cheaper alternatives come along someday, but again, I think Adobe has quite a stranglehold on the industry because their software is the standard.
- arpa 6y agoSure I'll pay for your software. I'll even print out the receipt. Download link? Nah, thanks, i'll just torrent it, because when you retire your ridiculous DRM that is phoning home, I still want to use the software I paid for. Thanks!
- olivermarks 6y agoA brief history of 'creative suites', ie commercial design studios pre computers: cowgum, rotring pens, scalpels, line board for camera ready art, process cameras The first macs: Cracked expensive Aldus and Adobe software Internet era: Macromedia, Adobe software, usually several versions old, sometimes cracked Turn of century: Adobe DVD installed software Adobe creative suite post 4 era: end of DVD installers, rental per month software, diminishing userbase Now: Macs running operating systems from 10 years ago running Adobe Creative Suite 3 & 4, + rented by the month current Adobe creative suite, steep learning curve, useful for file sending, learning new features when not busy
- LeoNatan25 6y agoI bet the warez versions install and "activate" just fine, though. Another well deserved win for DRM.
- Bigpet 6y agoI was surprised how easy it was. I searched for a version for my cousin to use (she doesn't have the money and won't make money from using it, but she was taught how to use it in school). The warez scene nowadays have pre-patched *.iso versions of the whole Creative Suite (last years version I believe). No need for a keygen, messing with your hosts file or manually replacing files after install. Not that I trust those, I didn't run them on my PC, just tried it out in a VM. If they went through all the effort of creating that version, then I don't really trust it to not contain a cryptominer of botnet client.
- m12k 6y agoI'm a developer, not a designer, but I've found that I can do everything that I previously used Photoshop and Illustrator for using Sketch and Pixelmator instead, and the latter are both polished and a joy to use.
- thdrdt 6y agoThis is the reason why I never buy an eBook with Adobe Digital Editions anymore. They should call it rent instead of purchase.
- noobermin 6y agoI want to say there has to be a better way but given half of HN now is devoted to selling *AAS'es they will be strongly motivated to not see this as a problem.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoYou can say it for the other half. Some of us really hate the as-a-Service model :).
- gogopuppygogo 6y agoI found this week that Adobe Fireworks CS6 no longer activates with a Creative Cloud subscription. I’ve been a Creative Cloud customer since launch but now have to crack my copy of Adobe Fireworks CS6 to use it. Horrific thought for me since I hate using hacks to run software (who the hell really knows what is in there) but I can’t find another way to use it legally (no one has a copy for sale second hand). I’d switch but I am very busy with work and can’t justify the time to learn new software right now while I still know all the features of Fireworks as I’ve used it since Macromedia introduced it. I wish upon wish that Adobe had just made it possible to obtain a license key for it that worked offline. Really upset at Adobe right now about this but also can’t imagine switching since everyone in the industry uses their file types. I won’t invest my time in learning more of their products after this though.
- tomc1985 6y agoJust curious, what is Fireworks used in?
- gogopuppygogo 6y agoWeb development for me. It’s the most logical layer based editor I have ever used.
- tomc1985 6y agoInteresting, I didn't know that it had the tools to work with the myriad different device sizes and resolutions. I used it back in the day but I was just making static images to be sliced into image maps
- porker 6y agoOh that's rubbish to hear. I started out using Fireworks in 2003(?) when I bought Macromedia Studio, and find it's still faster for me to use than Photoshop for a handful of tasks. And the way its layers work has always been more intuitive than Photoshop to me. So this sucks, as it's the one app I wouldn't want to let go of until I can find something to replace it. I suspect Sketch would, but I'm a Windows user.
- neya 6y agoFuck Adobe. When Creative Cloud was launched, the CEO promised that he would support existing CS6 customers like myself who had paid a lot of money for the master collection. And then, few years later, they announced they wouldn't support CS6 much anymore (atleast for Mac OS X Catalina users). After getting screwed royally, I shut down all my accounts with them and switched to Serif's Affinity Photo and Designer which are the equivalents of Photoshop and Illustrator which are two of the most used software packages for me. They had a 50% off sale going on during the pandemic and I think honestly it was worth every single penny and more and it has already paid for itself from a new client project. Fuck Adobe. We should all be boycotting them for the way they treat their customers.
- vimy 6y agoThey supported it for 5 years. Seems very reasonable to me.
- huron 6y agoI've had exactly this happen with Minitab 16. I have a 'perpetual' license. Can't install it anywhere?!?! Totally unacceptable. Minitab had no solution. They offered me a discounted upgrade which would have cost me over €700. Ridiculous.
- gkanai 6y agoI was an Adobe customer for decades. I stopped when they went subscription and NEVER plan to buy anything from them EVER again.
- nottorp 6y agoMeanwhile, I’m pretty sure the cracked versions work just fine(tm).
- GordonS 6y agoAre there any OSS options that come anywhere close to the functionality of apps in the CS2 or CS3 bundles?
- fsflover 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_raster_graphics_editors#List https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_raster_graphics_...
- open-source-ux 6y agoIf you're looking for a low-cost alternative to Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign, take a look at the Affinity suite of apps. Although they don't match Adobe apps feature-by-feature, they are professional grade apps with a lot of features. They are cross-platform (Mac and Windows) and they even have iPad versions of the Designer and Photo apps. The Affinity apps are not based on an online subscription model. The Affinity Spotlight website showcases what people are using the apps for and the type of content they are creating: https://affinityspotlight.com/ https://affinityspotlight.com/ I have all the Affinity apps and don't miss Adobe one bit, but the Affinity apps are a bit clunkly in their UI (but far less clunky than Adobe's apps). After Effects (AE) is the only Adobe app that has no real rival. A new motion and animation app called Cavalry recently launched but it's far too early to see if it can rival AE. It also uses an online subscription model (https://cavalry.scenegroup.co/ https://cavalry.scenegroup.co/).
- red_admiral 6y agoI'm sure I've read an old Joel on Software post somewhere about how Adobe/Photoshop got big in the first place, but I can't seem to find it anymore. The story as I remember it went like this: X had a practical monopoly on professional image editing and printing, everything else was for amateurs. (Was that Quark? not sure). Then X did something that pissed off a lot of their users, and within a few months everyone had pivoted to the newcomer, Adobe. The moral here is that if you've got a monopoly or at least a comfortable majority in an area of software, you shouldn't just be worried about someone else making a better product - switching is effort and people don't like that - you should be very worried about doing something that annoys your existing customers enough that staying but adapting to the new UI / pricing model / etc. is perceived to be as much effort as switching. (Whoever authorised the new UI for firefox on Android might want to think about this too.) What I can find is Strategy Letter III, saying that in this situation the best thing for a challenger to do is make sure their product is "backwards" compatible: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/06/03/strategy-letter-iii-let-me-go-back/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/06/03/strategy-letter-ii... Example: How Excel (that Joel was working on at the time) grabbed the market from Lotus 1-2-3. When people like @prox below say things such as "I switched to Affinity completely, and I also slowly see some people in the industry change.", I'm starting to think that Adobe might be ready for its Lotus 1-2-3 moment. Not letting people install their old Adobe software they've paid for is the best incentive to try out something new that I could think of.
- gridlockd 6y agoThis isn't going to piss off current customers though, it's going to piss off customers from fifteen years ago, who haven't upgraded, or maybe the freeloaders that used CS2 lately. A lot of people were pissed off about Adobe stopping perpetual licenses, but that didn't hurt their bottom line. In fact, they increased revenue because a subscription is a low upfront cost. Most of the people complaining about this are non-customers whose strong-held beliefs on how to license software have been offended. These people don't matter to Adobe's business.
- kmeisthax 6y agoSubscription revenue is also in and of itself valuable purely due to the fact that it's automatic. In fact, Adobe actually reduced the cost of their software significantly when they moved away from perpetual licensing. That's because it's far healthier for a business to get $50/mo out of you rather than thousands once in a blue moon. The cost of CS6 Master Collection was around $2,500 or so; whereas a CC All Apps subscription is $53/mo. The thing is, though, that Adobe frequently updated their software to newer versions that had significant backwards compatibility problems. That $2,500 would only get you about a year or two of "the latest version", upon which you'd have to spend another $900 for an upgrade. So Adobe went from a pricing model of effectively $2,500 + $450-900/yr, to one of $53/mo. Your first "year" of Adobe CSwhatever cost you $208/mo, followed by upgrades which were effectively $37-75/mo depending on how quickly Adobe released their software. Creative Cloud was and still is a bargain if you need Adobe's software. Sure, you could have just stuck with CS2 or 3, and amortized your software cost over multiple years. However, by doing that, you wouldn't be able to practically collaborate with anyone else in the industry. The moment someone you work with updates from CS3 to CS4, all their files are going to start throwing weird errors and not working when you load them up in your older version. And remember: Adobe Creative Suite was THE standard in a lot of industries, it wasn't like you could just insist everyone remembered to click the save-as-old-version option (if that was even available). Not upgrading was a business disadvantage.
- PrinceKropotkin 6y agoThey're encouraging piracy. This should be illegal!
- cies 6y agoSo Stallman (RMS) was right... Again.
- appleflaxen 6y agoCan a person who purchased these products with a US-based credit card now perform a charge-back based on this?
- anovikov 6y agoI still remember the procedure for installing them always included putting several "127.0.0.1" lines into hosts file. So i think, it only concerns users who want to do it legally.
- pibechorro 6y agogimp + krita = photoshop Inkscape = illustrator There are free, opensource alternatives that are 95% the same as greedobe. Use them.
- adobecs3 6y agoIs there a legal market for sale of old software? If you can choose to stop supporting somethig I paid for, I can choose to sell it (ethically at least)
- archon810 6y agoAnd yet Adobe's stock is trading near all-time highs. They must be doing something right on the business side.
- tvararu 6y agoI’d argue pirating is a justified measure in this situation.
- neop1x 6y agoNot directly related to this case but today I wanted to open a PDF as part of a insolvency case I am watching and when I opened that PDF in the embedded browser pdf reader it just displayed something like "Open in Adobe Reader for the best PDF experience" with a link to download Adobe Reader. And of course - Linux is still not among the supported platforms. So I was unable to open this PDF. Great company...