At this rate my owned outright copy of Adobe that requires no internet access, with hacks, will become a generational heirloom I can pass down to descendants with immersurable value.
Don’t pirate anything you use professionally. You are just begging for a lawsuit and to be treated as radioactive in the industry.
owned outright copy
It’s not piracy if you bought the software and own a permanent license to it.
It is once you start having to “hack” it, as that user claimed.
See, this is the issue; it’s not illegal to turn off my internet, it’s not illegal to block a program from accessing it, and it’s not illegal to run software i paid for.
If that’s a problem to clients then find better clients.
Okay? Just… maybe set aside a bit of money for a lawyer. No reason
Weird hill to die on, friend.
Are there any cases of this you can point to as illustration?
Seconding the request for a shred of precedent for the things 4am mentioned being grounds for litigation
That… isn’t how these kinds of things work?
If there is legal precedent, it is a no brainer. That is why you don’t use pirated software. https://www.technicalactiongroup.ca/these-companies-used-pirated-software-and-lost-millions-of-dollars/ is a random source i found that listed a bunch of legal cases.
But if we are in a grey area based on whatever vague “with hacks” nonsense was going on?
Company sends you a C&D because they decided what you are doing is piracy. They basically say “Give us money and we won’t go to court”. So you either give them money or try to go to court. At which point… setting aside a bit of money for a lawyer would have been a good idea. Wonder where that great advice came from.
The legal system in most countries (arguably all but I am sure there is a weird niche case) is inherently going to favor the large corporation with a team of lawyers on retainer. Which lets them more or less bully individuals and smaller companies to settle out of court which means that precedent is never actually established. That is where emulation generally lives, for example.
No, it isn’t. Hacking means doing something to it to fix a problem. Maybe that’s telling it to ignore an OS version check or something. That’s not illegal and it’s not piracy. You’re allowed to modify software you own. Even if the hack is removing DRM, it still isn’t piracy if you own it. It’s piracy to give it to other people who don’t own it.
You’re allowed to modify software you own
Companies have convinced people that exerting control over things they have purchased is still illegal if the company could make even more money from them. This attitude is a cancer on society.
The legality of modding, “modding”, and cracking software is still very grey. Arguably intentionally so. Because no company wants to risk a negative ruling and most users aren’t dumb enough to go to court with a fortune 500.
If the above user was really talking about just putting a new splash screen on Photoshop 1.5 from 10 years ago (… actually it would probably be closer to 20 or 30 at this point? Damn…)? Sure… but that is also the territory where using gimp or krita or paint.net in production is a much better idea.
But if those “hacks” are to increment versions or allow for plugins made for later versions of photoshop et al to run? That is where you are adding features you never paid for and where you start needing to be ready to cover your ass if you are profiting off of it because now you are “worth” suing.
And… good luck convincing a judge/jury when your argument is anywhere near as shakey as half the justifications for using pirated software in production in this thread are (I especially love the person who apparently feels that it is the company’s responsibility to sit down with you and explain the license agreement you are… agreeing to).
Learning a skill or even software? Pirate that shit. There is a reason companies like autodesk have REALLY good “free” versions of their software.
Running a smaller patreon and doing light gig work? You are starting to get into the danger zone but can probably get away with it because “nobody will ever know” so long as you aren’t dumb enough to upload the project files.
But once you start working for a “real” company or even reach “small business” levels of youtube? Now you need to actively hide what you are doing because that is the range where some bored person at Company X might look up in the database if you or your company have a license. And for the bigger companies? They might actively be working with Company X to iterate on features for a new release. And… That is also when you have enough money or exposure to be worth getting a C&D and told that you should settle and send them a large sack of cash.
Would you win the lawsuit? I… sincerely doubt it but we are also clearly in fantasy land in this thread and I am not going to bother to try to explain why “But I want it” won’t hold up. But… yeah.
If you bought photoshop back when it was not subscription and Adobe did not inform you that your license had an expiration date you can in fact do whatever the duck you want to it because you purchased it, you did not rent it, you did not subscribe. You purchased it and it is yours for life.
Matter of fact you have no idea if what you are suggesting would fly in court because I am pretty sure you don’t know about any previous case like this that has been even tried in court.
In a world long gone you could buy a physical copy of a program and black list it from your internet connection. And it didn’t care, it just did it’s thing. No hacking or Piracy needed, just legacy software.
Sounds like a bit of an overreaction
And if your company let the licenses expire a month ago, do you refuse to do your job?
If the software doesn’t run?
Yeah. You do. Because unless your company sends you a written email saying to go grab this off the pirate bay, then it is your ass on the line, not theirs.
And if they DO send that email? Document everything and run away as fast as you can.
That’s very nice in theory, but in real life you can either do your job by any means or find another one. And if you can’t find another one you just do what you have to do.
With all due respect:
You are a fucking moron if you put yourself at legal or financial risk for your employer. And that is what you are doing when you are using pirated software or other license misuse in a professional environment. Because you know what happens when Mathworks says “What the fuck? Why are we getting pings from the student version of Matlab at Innertrode?”? Your boss says “Oh shit. It must be Johnson. He went against our express instructions and this is a fireable offense”
And then you are fired and your boss doesn’t give a shit. Except you are also now the talk around the water cooler because you are a thief and you risked everyone else’s jobs in the process. Which tends to bode poorly when your former co-workers are on or near hiring committees at future jobs.
And if it was egregious enough that Mathworks is pissed? Guess what? Your company that you are willing to ride or die for is going to throw you to the wolves and do everything they can to get those fines on you because YOU were violating corporate policy.
If you can’t do your job without putting yourself at legal or financial risk then you won’t have a job for long. So rather than increase your risk until you get fired, start quiet quitting and interviewing elsewhere before the rest of the company gets sacked.
So I’m between guaranteed getting fired from not doing my work or maybe fired if someone finds out. Guess I’m the moron for choosing the former.
If your employer fires you for not pirating software on their behalf, you just stumbled into the easiest lawsuit of your life.
People complain now, but they’ll renew their subscription. It’s the same unhealthy relationship people have with Windows.
It is my understanding a lot of people maintain their unhealthy relationship with Windows as a prerequisite for keeping their unhealthy relationship with Adobe.
To be fair, the FOSS community in this area has categorically failed. GIMP’s mission statement is 1. be hateful to use and 2. be capable of editing photographs I guess. Inkscape can’t support CMYK colorspaces so just forget it if there’s an outside chance if it’s going to be printed, Krita can’t draw a circle, Pinta crashes every other thing…hell I wonder if Adobe pays the GIMP team to keep it unusable.
GIMP’s mission statement is 1. be hateful to use
It hurts to say but you’re right. I was like “can’t you remap the right mouse button to another tool? Everything in the context menu is in the Menu bar regardless” and they responded with “nope, design philosophy”
GIMP literally sucks on purpose. Anyone waiting around for GIMP to do what Blender did and suddenly become usable has missed the point.
But for what purpose?
making Adobe roll in money, i guess
yep. I feel like FOSS projects are always made by code monkeys who have no design sensibilities and designers do not touch any of these. a lot of them are not only unusable but uninstallable by the majority of the intended user base. whenever i find something i want to use it’s like:
—cool software. can i double click on an icon and have it ready to use?
—umm, don’t be ridiculous, normie. you gotta self host it and use the command line to enter some arcane incantations obviously. alternatively you can use these other methods you’ve never heard of. if you need any help you can refer to their respective indecipherable documentation.
—ok I’ll keep what i have until i find something that’s made for regular human beings, thanks.A lot of open source graphics software is made by programmers who also need to edit images sometimes. Both the lack of UI polish and featureset choices make more sense when looked at from that angle.
However, a lot of the criticism that gets thrown at these programs is also a bit unfounded. I regularly see people dunking on GIMP for not being a pixel-perfect clone of Photoshop for free. There is more than one way to design an image editor, and inability of some to learn another is really a user issue. GIMP could be better, but it still can and should be GIMP.
GIMP has a well deserved reputation for responding to “this is not nice to use” with “Good!” There are lots of ways to design image editors, sure. Many of those ways are awful.
Blender used to suck, too. Then they made a decision to improve. Which GIMP is bound and determined not to do. So it needs to go in the box with HURD and someone needs to do better from scratch.
The last time I used pjotoshop was on a relatively new Mac II. I’ve also never had issues with Gimp for some reason.
Many FOSS projects have asked that Designers get involved.
The only project with serious designers I know of are Gnome and Krita.
Install error. Exit code 0
Good luck fucker!
Martin Owens is working on CMYK support for Inkscape as we speak, and Gimp releases v3 during the summer if all goes well. Still, they’re small projects with very limited funding. Help them !
I use these tools everyday. Yes there are limitations, but for what MOST people need there are solutions. It just depends on what is important to you. Also, you can use the ellipse assistant.
I need it for work. It’s the industry standard and when I share files between myself and other designers I could potentially bung up a whole project if I’m using GIMP or Affinity by Serif.
Because we, the individuals, do not have the power to change it with an individual boycott and need to keep our livelihood intact. Go try to break you unhealthy relationship with petroleum.
This is actually an excellent comparison. I don’t own a car, and I advocate for the car free lifestyle. I also don’t recommend people using Adobe if possible.
A car is far from the only consumer of petroleum. Many electrical grids directly use hydrocarbons, construction uses petroleum, public transportation uses petroleum, local shipping uses petroleum, overseas shipping uses petroleum, manufacturing uses petroleum, plastic is made from petroleum, farms run on petroleum… Sure, most of those industries are trying to convert energy sources, but in no way can an individual avoid petroleum consumption and still live. Avoiding windows and Adobe is less insurmountable, but still a powerful stressor for people just trying to make a living.
This also matches my comparison.
Maybe someone who makes the GIMP uses photoshop. I actively don’t, and I recommend that others stop using it.
Maybe someone who delivers my food uses petroleum. I actively don’t, and I recommend that others stop using it.All these elements influence my decisions. If you want to continue promoting Adobe and Big Oil, that’s on you.
How’d you computer get to your home? Did it walk?
My desktop was given to me by my job. My laptop, I rode a bicycle to my friends house and paid him cash. What does that have to do with my promotion of being Adobe free?
You really are hands-off on this petroleum situation. You’ve got no part in it. It’s official. Everything in your life is a bike ride away and therefore didn’t use petroleum to get to your locality and didn’t take any to be manufactured. You won
People are subscribed to Adobe products?
Adobe basically invented the SaaS model. It’s not really practical to bootleg most Adobe products anymore either so most people break down and just pay the million dollar a year subscription fee so they can keep using it.
Holy Shitballs:
Also, hilarious that I can’t even get ahold of your support chat to question this unless I agree to these terms beforehand.
I can’t even uninstall Photoshop unless I agree to these terms?? Are you fucking kidding me??
Realising I also need to agree to the terms if I want to sign in and cancel my subscription
Can someone there give me an email for someone who can cancel my subscription without having to sign in and agree to these new terms first?
Realising I also need to agree to the terms if I want to sign in and cancel my subscription
I’m pretty sure this is not legal in EU
I think at that point I’d mail a certified letter and cancel whatever card it’s on.
That probably wouldn’t work but one can dream.
I mean it probably would. Their only recourse would be to sue you.
And if you have a decent credit card, and a record of your attempts to contact them and cancel your subscription, they’ll likely take your side if you back charge then block them from your card.
This is why vendors should send us a public address to pay, instead of us sending them a private address to charge.
What about sending a certified letter to the company in question stating they better reverse the idiotic decision or be prepared to face a lengthy prison sentence for it?
Wipe your system. Then it’s uninstalled.
Cancel your recurring payment. Then that’s done too.
If any large organizations want to make a large donation to Inkscape, GIMP, Krita and Blender that would be great.
I love FOSS alternatives, but let’s not pretend that GIMP is anywhere near being a viable alternative for professionals, unlike Blender who has got their shit together. I wish GIMP figured out actual decent UX.
The question I’d like to ask them is WHY they want to get involved in Content Moderation. They make a toolset, nothing more, so why do they care what someone is using the tools for? What could they possibly get out of this that makes it worth the time or expense?
I imagine it’s because of the generative AI stuff. If they’re using their servers to generate, they’re going to be responsible for what it puts out, even if it’s just responding to user prompts.
It is always the stuff that they mumble and handwave that you have to watch out for. The Moderation part is just to get everyone all talking about that. The scary part is the “other stuff”. They probably want access to everyone’s data so they can train their AI on it.
Yep, and with access to the work files they not only can use final images for AI training but they have access to the complete background information like the different layers of an image.
Not just the layers, but a full history of every alteration they made from the first pixel to the last.
As someone who’s used their tooling and the generative tooling… I have to admit trying to push its limits for giggles. It is VERY conservative already so I don’t see why they’d need additional moderation privileges.
This is an awful change.
I tried using their generative tools a while back and they were pretty terrible. Curious what your experience has been.
The illustrator tools are terrible. But removing and replacing backgrounds in Photoshop has been spectacular with one caveat - they are less great if you give it any instruction. If you use the generative fills with prompts the results are not at all great. However, if you leave the prompt blank it does a bang-up job matching the existing background set / scene.
Equally impressive has been generating parts of photos that are missing when extending the canvas size.
It tends to work best with photos that are “inside” (interiors) with strong geometric cues - but it has expertly matched lighting, backgrounds and their level of focus (or lack thereof).
Thanks for the insight, I was using it to create something new from a prompt, so my bad experience seems to align with yours.
The content is being uploaded to Adobe’s servers, they likely have the right and may even be legally required to moderate it to some degree.
This yet another reminder that the cloud is just somebody else’s computer. Somebody who might want to impose some degree of control with what is done with their computer, for whatever reason.
Feeding some other crappy AI
Wild. My old place we relied on this despite me urging us to use Figma/Sketch and Blender (amazing for 2D art). Naturally logistics factored into it as our clients relied on Adobe as well, but there were plenty of projects that didn’t need it.
We also had the dumbest guidelines to ensure no leaks. I would routinely get app requests refused despite the fact their source was right there on GitHub.
So now what are they gonna do? Because if they use Adobe, they can no longer ensure that a clients work won’t hit the net. May not seem like much for small indie projects but if we snagged the next GTA or Valorant, you bet that would attract some serious lookiloos.
Not sure if a client would find “it wasn’t us it was Adobe” all that comforting!
We use Figma for UI design at work. I really like it.
I’m not a designer, but I’m a developer that has to build the system. It has our internal UI library integrated into it, so the mockup looks practically identical to the actual implementation. When I click on a component, it shows the component name and a link to its documentation. Runs great in a browser without having to install an app. Really nice piece of software.
I’m glad the Adobe acquisition didn’t go though… I was scared Adobe would ruin it. I feel bad for all the Figma employees though… They were going to all receive a lot of money as a result of the acquisition, and everything was going well until it was blocked :/
Yeah totally agree. Figma removes a lot of the translation between design and implementation so design and dev are most always on the same page. Ps is an image program. It’s not meant for UI design. At all. Adobe tried to wedge in some UI design frameworks and flows but it’s Adobe. They could fuck up a cup of coffee. And no one uses Adobe XD. It’s too little too late. That’s when at my old employ I pushed for it. When I joined them, most of the designers were using Ai and Ps. Insane to me as Ai is even less suited for UI work. But they were like 20 and right out of school, which shocker, likely had a deal with Adobe so they pushed their software down their students throats.
I dreaded the sale of Figma. So glad it was stopped. Adobe already has such a monopoly on the design industry.
Figma
Did you even read what I wrote edgelord?
Yes and it was insightful.
I recieved today an email from Affinity saying that their whole suite of softwares is 50% off.
I’m assuming more people will be migrating to either Affinity or FOSS.
I currently use FOSS but I also really love Affinity. Especially since it’s a perpetual/lifetime license.
Until its not. Better pick foss. Request the features you want and make a donation. Simple as.
Yeah, Affinity was recently acquired by Canva.
We’ll see how that goes. For now, I’m using FOSS.
I’ll upload a shitton of nudes to adobe cloud and report them so a poor bloke has to review those
That’s like punching your food delivery person in the face because you got the wrong order, they’re not the problem.
So you think Adobe is too big and should be split up?
Ok, time to notify our design team not to use any Adobe products anymore and notify the commercial team to stop paying for licences.
What can you replace Adobe with? Serious question. I despise Adobe, but every alternative I’ve tried throughout the years either cannot do the job or ends up disappearing.
It seems our designer team doesn’t really use Photoshop. They switched to Figma from XD and most of their workflows don’t use Adobe software. They still use Illustrator occasionally, but they’re looking at Inkscape atm. If you have Photoshop in your workflow, you’re kinda fucked. https://www.photopea.com/ might be an option, but it’s not a 1:1 replacement. If you need Lightroom, then Darktable is a good alternative. It’s a bit janky here and there, but fully functional and stable. If you’re using Premiere then for fox sake switch to DaVinci Resolve already, it’s so much better than everything else and is free for many workflows and even for commercial use.
While I’ve no idea of your exact needs, I’ve been a happy Affinity customer for almost 3 years now (freelance web dev/designer).
It has everything I need (vector work, photo editing), and no subscription.
This is good to hear. It’s been a few years since I last tried to quit Adobe. I will have another go with Affinity and Krita (someone else suggested Krita as well).
Same choice as normal: whine about and then tolerate a change you don’t want in proprietary software rather than spend time learning to use a software-freedom-respecting alternative.
“But my workflow”.
Hey, a lot of people have deadlines and can’t just drop everything to spend a week learning if GIMP even meets their needs when Adobe is knocking their door down with this EULA change right the fuck now
And Adobe is counting on that. They knew this was bullshit and people would be made which is why the dropped it with (what seems like) zero warning
No hard feelings towards people who couldn’t, or didn’t, see this sort of thing coming.
I saw this coming and switched to GIMP and Inkscape. It’s been a pain but I’ve managed. I’m just the IT guy though, and I would be laughed out of the room if I suggested our marketing team consider making the same switch.
It’s not a matter of seeing it coming. They just don’t care.
Marketing won’t switch because GIMP and Inkscape simply aren’t as capable as PS currently. I hate Adobe, but they have professionals by the short hairs because all of the current competition is simply not competition at all for professional use.
A lot of us should be considering graphite.rs Once it has raster support, which is in the pipeline, it is shapingshaping up to be a pretty good UI compared to GIMP.
Can Adobe be used on a machine that’s sandboxed / offline? That way you can do your projects while disconnected from their servers, once the project is complete, just move your files onto an external drive and away from Adobe access?
Yes, with a virtual machine. But the experience will not be the best because the VM will lack a GPU. I’m sure there is ways to share some resources of the GPU with the VM to have a smoother experience but I have never done that on Windows
VMware workstation supports using a GPU. You can even use it in “pass-through” mode to give the VM full, exclusive access to the GPU.
Hm… I wouldn’t think you’d need a VM, rather just disable your ethernet card, disable/disconnect wifi, or unplug ethernet cable.
This is 100% because they are rolling out more AI features and they want the government to ban all open source competition because they aren’t “safe”.
Hard fucking pass.
Imagine getting banned from all of adobe just for drawing a dick with the brush tool in their expensive image editor.
Isn’t Photoshop by a lot of big corporations. Why would they sign up to that? Or do they get an exemption that isn’t available to private individuals?
Sufficiently large orgs probably will be eligible for exemptions under the theory that they are agreeing ahead of time.
But also? The Adobe suite are just leagues better than anything else in that space. Smaller companies with smaller contracts can get away with, frankly, lesser software. But at scale? You need stuff like the “Oh shit, we should stop calling it AI” plugins. And workflows matter a lot when the vast majority of your applicant pool have been using Adobe software for literally decades.
A decent number of the tech youtubers have done “We tried to not use Premier for one week” style videos. And they usually end up coming out with “I guess we could maybe make it work but it just isn’t worth it”
Much like with “this is the year of gaming for linux”, it is going to need massive amounts of grass roots effort to actually focus on UI/UX over “We don’t need that because we are smarter” bullshit. And, eventually, it will be good enough for influencers/taste-makers to give it a chance.
