Ah yes, the beginning of the subscription apocalypse that masked a 50% increase to annual cost behind a “cheaper monthly charge”. While I miss my time as a photographer, I’ll never miss Adobe.
I’ve still never recovered from the time I asked someone for a screenshot of an error they were getting and they literally printed their screen, circled the error, scanned it with our copier, then copied and pasted that into a Word document and attached that document to a reply email.
I usually figure out what it is that my users are trying to accomplish, which is usually something absolutely insane to buy Photoshop for, like resizing or adding text to pictures, and steer them toward some basic app like Paint.NET.
I did it a few months back, and immediately cancelled the new plan with no fees, worked a treat. Also FYI the educational discount is pretty great, I set mine up with my daughters email address no issues, I’m not sure how much they check this as it’s not a school email address.
No it’s always been that way. They have adopted a similar subscription as phone carriers. If you cancel early, you face a penalty.
Most other subscriptions don’t actually let you cancel and receive a refund (you just ride out the sub). But, that’s Adobe. They’ll always find the worst, shittiest way to make it happen.
I mean it’s the same company that held the internet down with Flash, that at one point was the top source of nearly all malware through a browser.
Unlike most online services that essentially do not offer refunds (you just ride out the subscription), Adobe has created more of a carrier type plan, where there is a yearly contract so it accrues the same penalty like any phone plan.
So yeah, legal. Just the worst kind of legal. And that’s Adobe. Just the worst kind.
Have you had a look at the Affinity suite? It certainly can’t replace everything, but for many users like me it’s not really missing anything for a one time payment.
They have -30% sales sometimes. I actually bought the whole suite at 50% discount some years back, but I don’t think they’ve had another 50% discount for a long time now.
If you’re interested in any of the Affinity programs, keep an eye out for sales. I’m guessing the next one will be Black Friday / Cyber Monday.
If you’re some dude who edits photos for his kids or makes bday cards for their family, there’s literally a dozen or more free image editors that work just fine.
If you’re in the industry, then you’ll quickly see no client will accept or work with an affinity file. Or a gimp file. Or a photomater file.
Adobe is the de facto standard and their monopoly is only getting worse. It also doesn’t help that schools are basically shills for Adobe. So every kid comes out knowing Illustrator and Photoshop and nothing else.
Hey adobe, how about you stop contacting everyone in our organization using a single non-profit license of a single product and telling them we should all be on a single cloud account so we can pay several times more for the same thing just to get access to sharing services no one wants?
Tangentially related… I work IT in a CNC shop. Most engineering prints that we get to make parts to have various specs on them for materials and various finishes. Those specs used to be free years ago, but they’ve most all been replaced, but not really updated at all. Now everytime they have a revision change, we have to buy the new revision from SAE for like $70 a piece. As shitty as that already is, in recent years, they have DRM locked them to a single user. So while we have 50+ employees with multiple needing to reference these for quality inspection or processing, it’s against the ToS to share those specs. We are supposed to buy one for each user which is fucking bogus.
Fuck em. I screen snip each page and make a new PDF, or that one user prints it out and scans it in. The extra kicker is that while that’s not allowed, you can buy a paper copy that can be shared for the same cost, you just have to wait for it to be delivered.
TL;DR: once “annotations” or “model codes” or whatever are incorporated into the actual law, they are no longer eligible for copyright.
That doesn’t stop organizations like SAE and ISO from trying to bully and trick you into agreeing to pay them for copies that you obtain directly from them instead of trudging down to the local law library and making copies yourself, however. (And it’s even worse when you want convenient electronic copies instead of paper, because then they try to apply EULA bullshit, which I’ve already debunked in another comment.) IMO it’s probably best to get the documents from some third-party source so you never get on the standards org’s radar for a shakedown to begin with.
If you can print, it means it’s possible. Maybe the built-in print to pdf driver transfers the DRM, but I’m convinced there is one that wouldn’t.
Edit: Or another idea, you can use features in screenshot programs like XShare that scroll through the document and take multiple screenshots and assemble it as a single image, or even PDF iirc, and that one wouldn’t have DRM (but wouldn’t be searchable without OCR.)
All of the audits we have to do, yea. They just care that we making good parts, that our paperwork is filled out correctly, and processes are being followed. Technically, if we didn’t have any of the specs but still did the process correctly, they wouldn’t care.
We need competition plain and simple start finding “good enough” and promoting it because at the end of the day if it’s good enough it’s solved the problem. Like gimp, it doesn’t have the bells and whistles but it’s good enough.
Not knowing who is on here, this is most certainly NOT a safe space. OP should not share if they think it would be detrimental if that information got out.
Expensive as hell, it insists I use their insecure office add on “PDF Maker” but people around here find it worth $350 a year to be able to merge pdf’s from the context menu so I’m stuck trying to find ways to support it with out compromising the network. I hate the adobe suite
And even if they have caught up companies already have the software stack and you need to know how to use it so you effectively blacklist yourself from the industry if you refuse to use photoshop or whatever.