> Adobe Tells Users They Can Get Sued for Using Old Versions of Photoshop
We need #FLOSS tools to get to the point where they can replace Adobe tools. Open alternatives are great, but they are sadly not there yet to replace Adobe tools for professionals.
And won't be unless projects like @inkscape get enough funding to develop to a point of being viable alternatives.
@rysiek@inkscape "Adobe is warning some owners of its Creative Cloud…" – Not correct at all. Adobe is the only "owner" of its cloud. Boggles my mind that this can be news to people. You rent rights and own nothing.
If you can replace #Adobe tools in your workflow today, great, more power to you! Not everyone can, sadly.
Tools like @inkscape, @Krita and @Blender are fantastic and built with love and energy and care. But in many cases they are still not an option for a lot of creative types.
So support them if you can. Use them if they work for you. Help improve them if you have the skills (that includes writing documentation, and working on better UI/UX!).
@Adam@rysiek@inkscape@Krita@Blender@GIMP@kdenlive better to work on consistency and making it easier to follow first (good UI design) and focus on customizability later. If you do customizability right out of the gate, it makes things a lot harder to manage.
Not sure how far they are in the being good alternatives to Adobe products, but I think these two are chipping away at other parts of the adobe empire.
But people also mention @kdenlive (video editor) and @darktable (photography virtual "lighttable" and raw "developer" for digital photos)
Outside of the FOSS space, I’ve had great luck converting folks in my life to use the Affinity suite of tools from Serif: https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/
Good solid tools, that you buy once and get to use.
@nitinnaik Adobe used to be one-time payment, too a while back, no? At least it used to be not subscription based.
I am not saying you should not switch to Affinity. The more people do the less power Adobe has, and that's a net win.
But Maybe we should learn from Adobe's abusive rent-seeking turn, and recognize that any proprietary software fully controlled by a for-profit company can take the same kind of turn as soon as it gains enough power in the market.
I don't know enough about advanced photography techniques to really tell how good you are compared to lightroom.
I went through some of the tutorial went look sliders! Hey neat tagging. Oooh easily syncable parallel metadata files instead of one big database for nextcloud to corrupt. (Which happened to me with digikam a long time ago)
@rysiek thank you for this take. it's really bothersome when switching to the open source alternative is portrayed as "why don't you just". it's not that simple, but these tools are always getting better and more and more people can switch.
@rysiek people who've been following us for a while already know this, but we strongly believe that free software for creative professionals would be ideally made by user-owned co-ops
there are a lot of creative types out there who we see saying they'd happily chip in to build something if they felt like they knew a way to do that that would actually make a difference
@rysiek@inkscape@Krita@Blender there's nothing that can effectively replace After Effects. That one has zero real competition. Fusion/Resolve and Motion are neat but nowhere near usable for advanced mograph.
@rysiek I am a big advocate for #FreeSoftware as really the ONLY way for consumer protection in terms of the software we use.
I would never tell someone to not use Adobe for work on their work computer. My workplace needs me to use Windows and many proprietary software on my day job.
That is a very different think than your personal computer at home. And I think many who use Adobe stuff for hobbies could probably switch to freedom-respecting software and still do everything they want to.
@rysiek in a business environment, the freedom-disrespecting EULA of proprietary software is an agreement between the software co and an other business, so in that case it does not bother me.
For me personally, I'd rather not agree to terms like that (sometimes I do, because compromises, but that is an other topic).
@nicemicro being a professional creator does not necessarily mean "business".
Many fedi creators, bringing us whimsy and wonder, are professional in the sense that they support themselves through their work (for example, via Patreon and similar services), but do not necessarily run a "business".
And even if they do, how is it not outrageous that a behemoth like Adobe is holding small creators hostage like this?
Why should we turn of empathy just because a small creator runs a "business"? 👀
My post is about that as a free software activist, I'm not going to advocate that professionals use free software, because professional use merits different considerations than personal use.
Anything else you read into my posts was not there.
@rysiek because in a business your first consideration is to make as much money as efficiently as possible, so if someone says "I NEED Photoshop to be able to do my job", I tend not to pretend that I know better.
@nicemicro I guess there is a difference between "advocating" and "proselytizing".
I want to live in a world where FLOSS is used both in professional and all other contexts.
As a hobbyist, I want to be able to use professional-quality tools. As a professional, I want to not be locked into a specific "ecosystem" controlled by a specific company.
It bothers me a great deal that somehow such rent-seeking exploitation by Adobe can be seen by anyone as not something to be bother by.
@rysiek (and hopefully you don't keep sensitive personal stuff on your work computer that you need the level of safety only free software can guarantee)
@nicemicro why should this even be an either-or? Why should we not expect to have professional-quality software that is freedom- and privacy-respecting?
@rysiek I agree with you in this, as that should be the goal.
You are right, and we should make business owners aware of the risks of proprietary software.
My approach in this regard is more pragmatic, and in that, individual private users are the ones who get most damaged by proprietary software as they aren't even gonna make money on it. And for private use, #FreeSoftware alternatives are perfectly viable.
@TerryHancock in the broader thread there are plenty of examples of specific functionality that is missing from FLOSS alternatives. It's not just "I don't like that the button layout is different".
Right. But for those changes to be made, it is the coders, who need to do the work. While features are missing for the business use case, advocating #FreeSoftware for the business users will make minimal impact.
Unless of course you can convince the business owners to pay for the missing features to be implemented, while they keep paying for the proprietary software that lets them pay the bills now.
> Unless of course you can convince the business owners to pay for the missing features to be implemented, while they keep paying for the proprietary software that lets them pay the bills now.
Exactly. And it's not as far-fetched as you think. Adobe's antics are effectively a real risk to business continuity. Helping FLOSS tools become real alternatives is a meaningful way of managing that risk.
@nicemicro
This is indeed the business model of several successful postgresql consulting companies: Pay them to implement (and upstream!) whatever is missing for you to switch from oracle/etc. The cost of development is most often less than a year or two, which makes it a financially sound choice for companies. @doctormo@rysiek@TerryHancock
@rysiek@inkscape@Krita@Blender To be fair I've also de-Googled as well. I'm slowly divorcing myself from the unhealthy marriage I had with cloud-based services. 🤣
I agree with most of what you said except about Blender. By now it’s indeed a professional tool through and through and there’s really no reason not to switch, unless you really want to throw away money. It took me a long while to transition from Cinema4D and to reprogram muscle memory and I miss Mograph sometimes, but now that they added light linking, it can be as professional as anything out there. I can’t stop recommending it to everyone.
@villewilson@rysiek@Blender What if you're at a studio who has built extensive tooling around Maya because Blender didn't exist when they started? I've heard that story before.
Not that Weta's actually using Maya anymore, but it's a load-bearing abstraction for them. And I would agree that Blender's better built for that purpose!
@alcinnz@Blender@rysiek it’s a valid argument for big studios as with their workloads and deadlines, the price of the software they use plays a minor role in comparison to other more important variables. But on the other hand, Blender feels so stable lately compared to all the paid alternatives in the industry that one could build an argument that just the time saved on Blender not constantly f**king crashing like all the others is worth the switch.
yeah, and such studios would have trouble switching to basically anything else from Maya. My argument was more in direction that if Weta tomorrow decided to switch to 3D Max or Cinema 4D or whatever paid alternative, it wouldn't be any easier than switching to Blender, and I'm super happy about the fact that Blender is just as robust as any of the big league players and that you don't have to be a FOSS enthusiast anymore to recognize its objective strength nowadays.
@rysiek Great post, thanks. I'm struggling with that indeed. We pay for Adobe, for Resolve, we use Blender. Often, we find that a concern is hardware support, whether having good drivers for NVIDIA cards (Wayland is taking Linux backward), support for video cameras (decoding 4:2:2 h.265 from modern cameras is heavy, I have a dual-GPU machine for that purpose), support for still cameras (it's painful buying a new camera and finding that your photo software can't open its files), for printers...
@jbqueru absolutely. Then again my (somewhat limited, not a graphics professional here!) experience is that Linux is much, much better in supporting older formats and older hardware.
Official Canon thingy for Mac removed support for older Canon cameras, I remember struggling with that problem. Linux? Sure, here you go, full support with bells and whistles.
@rysiek I totally agree. The spirit of Free Software (and even more of the GPL variants) is that users should have the possibility to maintain the software they depend on.
@jbqueru it's much simpler than that even, I think! FLOSS simply does not have a strong incentive to remove working functionality. Whereas Canon absolutely does: "buy our new camera, why don't you."
@rysiek That might not be as true for camera vendors as it might be for other domains, because reliability and durability are valuable marketing and perceived features of cameras. Plus, the big money for camera makers is in the lenses, and making cameras last a long time results in more lens sales.
The chances that Adobe will soon belong to Microsoft are quite high, IMO. And MS is forcing Outlook users to open links in Edge (at least initially) and MS announced Acrobat Reader will be welded onto Edge.
@rysiek Adobe's licensing tactics make me so mad. Every time I have had to reinstall or transfer software from Adobe it has been a major hassle. The benefits being a monopoly, I guess. I am trying to learn @darktable so I can ditch Lightroom. I would much rather send my $$ to a #FOSS project.
@rysiek@inkscape TBF it's kinda shooting the messenger, Adobe is just telling users that they could be sued due to third party licensing that is no longer valid. Or some such guff.
Adobe are still dicks, even if only because of what they did to Macromedia Freehand. Yes, I can hold a grudge for a looong time.
Completely agree that we really need a FLOSS vector and raster editing program that's on the same level as something like Blender. Oh, and a NLE. There are FLOSS examples of all of these programs, but they really don't cut it at the moment. The Blender project shows that this doesn't have to be the case.
@rysiek@inkscape Hey! This is my friendly reminder that GIMP has a very unfortunate name, that’s at best a useless backronym and at worst a slur that triggers some artists and prevents them from using it. It deserves a beautiful name for the ages.
@pl@rysiek@inkscape A friend with muscular dystrophy actually took the position that he wanted to take back the word gimp because one of its original meanings was “fighting spirit.” He certainly had that.
@rysiek@D_J_Nathanson@pl Many have tried to change the name, last one was the Gilmpse fork, but they gave up quickly.
Speaking of GIMP, they seriously lack developers, GTK 3 was released in 2011 and GIMP 3.0 (the GTK 3 port) is still alpha. Sadly as long as this remains common in the FOSS world nothing will be able to compete with Adobe and the likes. You can't force volunteers to work on something they don't want to work on while companies can shift entire teams to another department.
@rysiek i wish there was a good alternative to Lightroom that can also seamlessly import existing catalogues ... I'm locked into it, effectively, since I have decades' worth of raw files managed in it. at least I'm on the last "proper" version of it that you could outright buy before it went Creative Cloud leasing model...
@patrick_h_lauke@rysiek Darktable can iirc, you just need to ask Lightroom to create sidecar files and work with those, not just the single catalog file, doesn't seem that difficult.
@darktable themselves might have some rough idea on where to point you for that
@darktable@tek_dmn@rysiek ... and there we go, i have almost 20 years' worth of DNGs with edits, and want to still maintain the capability to get back and tweak those edits at any point. that's what's keeping me locked into keeping my old version of lightroom...
@patrick_h_lauke@tek_dmn@rysiek yeah but that's what lock in is, right, and I'll be that way for every photo editing app. We don't think there are any raw editors where edits are interchangeable.
At some point you will have to decide not to be locked in anymore, export jpegs/tiffs of your current edits, then accept that you'll need to reedit in your new editor.
Or at some point you'll need to start paying adobe monthly. Maybe thats worth it for you. Maybe not
@darktable@patrick_h_lauke@rysiek I wonder, DUMB wonder, if it's possible to read the XMP sidecars you can get Adobe to generate, and try and match them to DT operations. It won't be 100%, but having someone construct a program that knows roughly what LR op corresponds to what DT op, you can get most of it moved over...
...Probably not helpful in a practical sense, but now I'm curious. I just don't have any LR data with me to experiment with.
@tek_dmn@patrick_h_lauke@rysiek sure its technically possible, but then you're just chasing them, and adobe makes it difficult to chase them on purpose. Take a look at the PSD file format if you need further proof.
We want to make good tools to edit your photos with, not spend time chasing Adobe formats.
@tek_dmn@patrick_h_lauke@rysiek the hardest part will be that Lightroom uses a DCP formulated after the manufacturer's jpeg, and darktable doesn't even try at all to do or replicate that.
@darktable I wonder if that's something that could be regulated: if a file format is introduced and maintained by a vendor in a monopolistic position on a market, the file format needs to be open, standardized, and not patent-encumbered.
It's a pipe dream, of course, but perhaps possible long-term.
@rysiek@darktable@tek_dmn@patrick_h_lauke Even then they will make interoperability hard by making 'mistakes', adding custom extentions, make the format ambiguous or very complex, etc.
@darktable@patrick_h_lauke@tek_dmn@rysiek I wonder if anybody has explored the idea of finding a sequence of edits that would give you picture A from picture B. Then people could export both the original and edited image and rebuild the edits from the image comparison.
@rysiek@inkscape I feel like one of the big challenges with #FLOSS tools for things like image editing is that initially, FLOSS flourished where the users were more inclined to manipulate the tools themselves, and to do things like submit patches, take on more development roles, or even just read the code to try to understand it. It was a hit then for things like the Apache web server, and other GNU system tools - the users were closer to the code, so to speak, and would dabble in it to some extent.
On the other hand, people using things like image editors are more thinking of creating whatever it is they're trying to create, as opposed to maintaining an infrastructure. Someone just editing a photo isn't necessarily thinking about the inner workings of their OS (to the extent someone hacking on a web server might be). So, there's more of a gap between the people who would be using that and the people who would be writing those tools.
I like the way #Blender had open movie projects, where the developers would work alongside artists to produce an actual creative work. I think more of that kind of thing would benefit the likes of #Krita and the #GIMP, and other projects.
@rysiek@inkscape The only way I see any of the alternatives replacing Adobe products is if they do what Blender did:
Try to create a professional quality product (like the blender shorts) regularly, and note in which ways the software is lacking either because it doesn't have certain features or because the UX to achieve them is not good, without falling into dumb criticism like "it's not exactly like the competition so it sucks". That and a lot of donations aimed at the needed improvements discovered with each attempt.
With each cycle of improvement, more people can use it for work because it covers new use cases.
@rysiek@inkscape one of the big problems that FLOSS software has to replace Adobe or similar are the proprietary colors and color spaces, particularly for CMYK offset printing. Either building an alternative or paying for a license are complicated (it would mean distributing non-free software).
Other than that, I've been quite happy with Inkscape and Blender since I left Adobe software a decade ago.
@rysiek@inkscape i THINK i MAY HATE THIS?! TOUCH UPS INCLUDED? i DID MOST ART IN 2006 COMIC-STRIP.ORG, BUT CAN'T AFFORD LIFE IN GENERAL, Oppps caps lock
@rysiek@inkscape Adobe’s message was clearly legal department “CYA” (Cover Your Ass). Users of old Adobe apps aren’t being threatened by Adobe, they’re being warned that licensing agreements for bits of code inside the old versions that are owned by other companies are expired. So if these other companies are patent troll types, the users may be at risk. But in reality, probably gonna be fine. They just had to limit their own liability. Boring legal stuff.
@MattMerk@inkscape yes, and both are proprietary, meaning nothing really stops the companies behind them from being sold (like what happened to Figma), or from pulling an Adobe themselves if and when they become the biggest player on the market.
It's good that these tools exist and that creatives can use them now. But this is not a solution, this is a band-aid.
The solution would be what I mentioned in my toot: FLOSS tools that become good enough to replace Adobe. And these need funding.
@rysiek@inkscape my experience shows creative types are hardest to change their tool set or work flows. They feel such disruptions with way more pain that common user, and see any retraining as wasted time that could be spend on doing stuff.
So I don't think it has anything to do with alternatives. They are used to use Adobe, it is their crack, Adobe knows it and can yank chain as much as they want.
@rysiek@inkscape If you switch Software, there is a certain pain you will havt to experience. You need to learn how to use it, you have a lack in productivity until you master the new tools.
Currently the pain of continue to use Adobe is still lower then the pain to switch. But Adobe puts more salt into these wounds with every action like this.
Ex-mesiadesigner and DTP guy here. Fully switched to OSS Alternatives about 3 years ago. Krita and Gimp, Scribus, Inkscape, kdenlive... It works.
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