I’m so absolutely sick of it.
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?
If you think Adobe is bad just wait until you have to deal with Autodesk.
Literally argued with a bunch of game-pass supporters on this very topic today, where we don’t own shit anymore and everything is rental only. Sick of people gobbling corporate cock.
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 $70 a piece. As shitty as that already is, in recent years, they have DRM locked them to a single user. So while we have 50+ employees with multiple needing to reference these for quality inspection or processing, it’s against the ToS to share those specs. We are supposed to buy one for each user which is fucking bogus.
Fuck em. I screen snip each page and make a new PDF, or that one user prints it out and scans it in. The extra kicker is that while that’s not allowed, you can buy a paper copy that can be shared for the same cost, you just have to wait for it to be delivered.
Same with ISO docs. Imagine being required by law to follow specs you have to pay to know.
Imagine being required by law to follow specs you have to pay to know.
Relevant case law:
TL;DR: once “annotations” or “model codes” or whatever are incorporated into the actual law, they are no longer eligible for copyright.
That doesn’t stop organizations like SAE and ISO from trying to bully and trick you into agreeing to pay them for copies that you obtain directly from them instead of trudging down to the local law library and making copies yourself, however. (And it’s even worse when you want convenient electronic copies instead of paper, because then they try to apply EULA bullshit, which I’ve already debunked in another comment.) IMO it’s probably best to get the documents from some third-party source so you never get on the standards org’s radar for a shakedown to begin with.
It’s always ethical to pirate from Adobe.
Firefox is getting the ability to edit PDFs. Its not quite ready for prod so I use SumatraPDF
I signed up for creative cloud and accidentally signed for a year. They want 60$ to cancel the subscription. Suck my taint.
How is that even legal
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.
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.
Adobe’s monopoly extends far beyond “software.”
