No, again, a VPN will not do anything here. Is not that you cant access some site because the Venezuelan Firewall does not let you, or that Adobe blacklist all IPs from there.
Is that when they see your credit card saying you are Juan Bimba* from Venezuela, they are going to say no thanks.
You would need somebody else to buy the software for you, and that will open them to the same kind of liabilities, not to mention how do you organize that.
Think “John Bulldog” only Venezuelan. And only that he is always portrayed as poor and hapless
It’s not often that I can see the storm approaching. This just validates my efforts of the last couple of months to find a way for my department to move away from Adobe; or at least lessen our dependence on them.
I know it won’t fit every workflow, but I’ve had great success with the Affinity suite of apps. And they are a “pay once and you own them” licensing model, and the price is not astronomical.
It’s certainly a shift learning to use them, and Designer has been a bit glitchy at times on the Mac, but it’s doable. Some things in our process it does far better than PS and AI.
Late to the party, and haven’t seen the other replies to your comment, but I would say he’s suggesting this is the fatal flaw in trusting the means of your livelihood to a cloud based subscription model. Right now they are stripping their products from the hands of their customers because the government says so. The point is, they can do it at any time for any reason, and you – the customer – may not always fall on their good side. If they are the “only game in town,” and they don’t allow you to own their product, that’s a big problem.
Ah, the good old days. But Adobe has embraced DRM for ages. You could reinstall, but unless you used a cracking program, it would phone home and disable itself if it was told to. And if you tried to run it without a connection or a crack, it would stop working until you let it phone home.
Admittedly, having a physical disc to work from might allow the skilled people to build the cracks easier than a cloud based app does. Or not. I’m not one of those skilled people.
Step 1 in being rich, don’t let go of any money you have unless you absolutely have to. I had a millionaire boss at my previous job who would steal sugar packets from restaurants. Since this is a governmental directive, the Venezuelans likely have no legal recourse to sue Adobe and get their money back, so Adobe isn’t going to voluntarily give the money back. Basically, they are assholes.
Yes, but in this case they didn’t pay for a product. They paid for a service. Just the way Adobe wants it.
I’ve yet to delve into Affinity Photo, my focus has been on Designer; although I bought all three apps.
I also know what we do is not necessarily what other people do. But right now, if Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign stopped working for us, I am confident I could get the work we need to do done with the Affinity apps.
And they are still developing for it, with the major 1.7 update adding a lot of features to the whole line. I honestly can’t think of anything the latest versions of Photoshop have added that I was happy about. The last thing that really helped us was probably Generator. They even screwed up scaling now, and that should have been easy.
I’ve been with Photoshop since version 3. For my workflow, I know it damned well. Changing apps is not easy, with that many years focused on one way of doing something. But I’m damned sure going to try, because fuck this noise already. You can still make money using alternatives to Adobe software. It’s the end product that matters, not which tools you used to get there. You just need to be flexible and willing to learn new things, accept that at the start things will take longer, and be confident that you will get faster as time goes on.
And they always will for as long as Adobe is seen as insurmountable. Instead of continuing to feed the 5000-lb gorilla that’s Adobe, spend money on promising alternatives. Or just stop feeding the gorilla.
If they didn’t, I’m sure we’d have arrests in the US for things that are Very Illegal in human rights shitholes like Saudi Arabia, and frankly, that would suck.
Gimp is great, I use it.
It is about as good now as Photoshop was in the late nineties and has about the same features as Photoshop 5.0 had.
The Adobe suits are totally fantastic, I’ve used many thousands of bucks worth of their pirated softwares before they were moved to the clownds because there is nothing else out there even remotely comparable.
Gimp is second best but not in the same league, we’re stuck in the last millennium.
It makes me sad and angry that the Adobe rents are too high. Wonderful things I could make, won’t be made. If I could pirate their services I would just have to.
It is wrong to keep tools from talent. They use the cloud to do it.
That said, I think Adobe probably doesn’t have any options in its dealings with Venezuela but to do as the government demands and to terminate the rentals of their software running on their servers.
They are not the bad guys here.
Maybe, or it was just a risk assessment. They can either terminate the licenses or not terminate the licenses. Regardless of technical legal arguments about what is and is not a transaction, one of those options is far more likely to piss off the US government than the other.
I’ve heard digital artists rave about Krita, which is free, and Clip Studio Paint, which is a much lower-cost one-and-done payment. I don’t know of any good alternatives for photo editing, though I’m sure there must be some out there.
The last Photoshop I used was PS7 (before Creative Suite debuted.) It was hella powerful, but had a steep learning curve. At the time I was flirting with becoming a Web designer, so I gave PS a shot. But since it was more of a hobby for me I decided it was too expensive to buy upgrades (and the laptop I had then couldn’t handle anything more anyway.) I doubt I’d ever go back to it, unless I could find an older non-subscription version really cheap. These days I play around on my tablet with Autodesk Sketchbook and dev.macgyver’s Photo Editor (both are free), and I can do most of what I want to do. It’s not always easy, but I get there eventually.
I’m making an absurd philosophy-class point. The specific thing I took issue with was that we ought to call ourselves libertarians if we champion “live and let live”. I don’t think it makes sense to call a person a “libertarian” unless individual liberty is a core value for them. So I think I’m politically aligned with a lot of libertarian socialists, and I am probably an ally of theirs, I don’t share their underlying values.
Basically I’m saying, “Hey, don’t call me a libertarian.” And, let’s face it, that’s because my dad is a libertarian.
“Libertarian” can mean different things to different people and runs a gamut. And they do seem to have a bit of a black mark attached to the name. I use the term “anti-authoritarian”.
Except that they did pay for the “service” in advance, and now Adobe is cutting them off - no refunds.
Also, the whole “software as a service” thing is bullshit anyways = even Adobe’s own website says it’s “selling” it, not “renting” it. Nobody wants to rent software they need on a daily basis. This is just the latest late-stage capitalism cash grab that wouldn’t be legal if lawmakers were sane or monopolies had any sort of real limits left on them.
I agree. Adobe are being assholes because they can afford to be assholes. They should refund the money for the services that were paid for and not provided, but nobody is going to force them to, so they won’t.
I can’t speak for him; but I suspect that it’s more of a “dangers of not owning anything” piece than an argument that Adobe should give the feds the finger.
When something is as-a-service you are at the mercy of the vendor and anything they choose or are forced to do, indefinitely, because you never actually take custody of even a freestanding copy.
Getting killswitched because of sanctions is slightly more exotic than the usual cases of just enjoying endless pricing model perturbation; with the occasional surprise EOL when strategies change or vendors die; but all the same genre.
There’s absolutely nothing about a photo editor that implies an ongoing dependence on specific transnational togetherness; until you add ‘cloud’ and deliberately engineer for brittleness.
For the sake of my blood pressure please promise to keep said ancient copy from hooking into your browser or your shell; and ideally disable flash and JavaScript and only use it on PDFs that have been inspected by something more recent first.
Legacy Adobe products are almost as good as ancient java plugins when it comes to being massively vulnerable.
Me too. I originally used and loved Apple’s Aperture even as it stagnated fell far behind Lightroom’s featureset. Then Apple killed it off entirely, and I briefly tried Lightroom. The SAAS thing bothered me.
I’m pretty sure taking money for goods, then refusing to let you access the goods you paid for but also refusing to refund your money is what we call “fraud” over here in the civilised world. Maybe a couple of people should start a class action against Adobe?
I do agree with you. That’s why I paid for a license of Corel (and more recently purchased a copy of Affinity suite), and blatantly pirate Illustrator.
Adobe (excuse my language) can go fuck itself sideways with a nail encrusted cucumber for what I care.
cloud 
to do it.
