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Subscription licenses scare me

from my point of view, every company is capable of becoming corrupt sooner or later. History has shown that to be the case repeatedly over thousands of years. Companies. are run by corruptible human beings. It is what it is. The human condition.

That's why I will not ever pay a subscription for software. Software makers can sell me what they have made if its worth it to me I will buy it.
 
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Obviously it's great for developers, because they have a level *revenue stream*, as it's called in the art world.

And that's fine. Again, my issue is with time-bombed software.
 
and yes every government, is capable of becoming corrupt sooner or later. History has shown that to be the case repeatedly over thousands of years

Move that to the OT politics section, please. It's an argument against every form of government, one that the brilliant people who wrote our Constitution had in mind with every word... and not one against trusting a company to come out with updates.
 
Absolutely not the case with the Adobe switch. In my experience it was a huge cash grab.

It feels like that to me too, I must say. I'm paying significantly more for three years Creative Cloud subscription than I paid for all the Adobe software combined, which I purchased and worked with in the 22 years (as a graphic designer) prior to Creative Cloud.

What I find strange is that Adobe has picked a very bad time to start annoying its customers even more (with this "you can't use older versions of our software") than they already were doing, because once Affinity Publisher is released — any day now — and the Affinity triptych will be complete (and the printing houses begin to accept Affinity-generated material), masses of Adobe-reliant designers will make the switch, I'm sure of it. You'd think that, with this threat looming larger by the day, Adobe would do all it can to please its user base. But no, they're doing the exact opposite. Quark payed a very high price for its complacency and arrogance. If Adobe — at least, its graphic department — doesn't watch out, they might be in for a similar fate.

_
 
I'm with you on the subscription model often not being good for consumers.

But it's also clearly, literally, and like, literal in the most completely literal sense of the word 'literal', a thoroughly capitalist model of recognizing revenue.


Companies use subscription models to increase their revenues. Not because the want to help the poor.

You do not understand completely the meaning of capitalism, but that is ok, there is so much misinformation in the world now about it that is understandable. Capitalism and socialism have nothing to do with helping the poor or making rich people richer. They both deal with allocation of resources. One way does it by allowing free enterprise to automatically balance out the allocation of resources through capitalistic principles..the other uses some form of central planning to "engineer" social solutions.

If you give your money ahead of time to the vendor and trust they will engineer the best solution for you, then yes you are following a socialized path. A capitalistic path puts more emphasis on the dynamic between producer and consumer to balance out the allocation of resources depending on people making things of value so that people will give them their money for it.
 
All pure ideology fails when applied to the real world.

Time-bombed software is not ideology, it's a business model that we as consumers have a choice to... subscribe to or not.
 
just responding to what people are responding to me.

Sorry I used such scary words.

Bottom line, I don't like paying software companies ahead of time for yet-unmade software.

Does that work for you?
 
Can we please stop the capitalistic preaching?

Especially when we're talking about two equally capitalist flavours of capitalism. Basically "the flavour of capitalism behind door number 1" vs "the flavour of capitalism behind door number 2".

(Ok, that's me out, enjoy the rest of the thread everyone).
 
Publisher is released — any day now — and the Affinity triptych will be complete (and the printing houses begin to accept Affinity-generated material), masses of Adobe-reliant designers will make the switch, I'm sure of it. You'd think that, with this threat looming larger by the day, Adobe would do all it can to please its user base.


I hope you're right on this. Adobe went to the subscription model shortly after various acquisition gave it a kind of defacto natural monopoly based not so much on superior technology as much as things like the hight cost of even minor cross application incompatibility and such. Not really all that dissimilar from the other web 2.0 monopolies at root.

It would be great if Affinity can bring back some genuine (capitalist) competition to break this defacto monopoly.
 
I really hope Adobe don't prosper from this Subscription policy, so others won't follow on. It really is not a good feeling to pay a chunk of money every month and still not really own the software.
They knew Photoshop & AE (their only two good products tbh) were widely depended.

With EastWest, Composer Cloud is a little different for me. EWCC if you have it and it can do a job for you for a certain piece of music, then good because you can seal that off and move on; you don't need yo go back to it generally speaking.
With Photoshop you've got your workstation set up (Actions/Brushes etc) and are sharing PSD files between everyone... ugh.

As for me I am still using CS6, and so far its doing the job.

Slate Digital offer a subscription. Again, that's psychologically hard for me to pay money and not own it. Now, if they came out with a,"rent it for two years, and after that time you own it..." ...might be better.
Some vendors did this with the Serum synth etc. That appeals more.
 
Can I quickly jump in on the Adobe bashing?

A couple of months back, I signed up for a free trial for Adobe stock pictures. When the trial ended, I forgot to cancel it and paid for a month's subscription. I didn't think anything of it and set a reminder to cancel it for good in 30 days time.

30 days later, I logged on to cancel the subscription, only to find that I was now committed to a "yearly" plan and would have to pay a cancellation fee of £160. Apparently, this is what I signed up for.

The year term certainly wasn't clear at signup. A quick Google revealed I wasn't the first to be fooled by far. The same search revealed that others had contacted Adobe online chat to have the cancellation fee waived, with success. So I tried the same, following the same playbook whilst receiving exactly the same canned responses from Adobe.

The worst (or best) bit? Adobe agreed to completely cancel the subscription and waive the entire fee. All it took was a 3 minute chat online and it was done. I'm not sure what's worse: The predatory signup model or the fact that Adobe can't or won't enforce their own payment penalties and instead rely on people not to complain.

So yep, Adobe = Charlatans. I've hated them forever.
Rant over.
 
Ok, I think there might be a way to constructive roll this into something that's actually relevant ...

You do not understand completely the meaning of capitalism, but that is ok, there is so much misinformation in the world now about it that is understandable. Capitalism and socialism have nothing to do with helping the poor or making rich people richer. They both deal with allocation of resources. One way does it by allowing free enterprise to automatically balance out the allocation of resources through capitalistic principles..the other uses some form of central planning to "engineer" social solutions.

If you give your money ahead of time to the vendor and trust they will engineer the best solution for you, then yes you are following a socialized path. A capitalistic path puts more emphasis on the dynamic between producer and consumer to balance out the allocation of resources depending on people making things of value so that people will give them their money for it.


Listen, sorry if I've been needling you - it was really intended to be good natured, but I really don't know where you're coming from.

I do agree with your general point, but I think were we're getting derailed here is that you're comparing two perfectly normal models of capitalist revenue of the modern software industry, which are legitimately compared and critiqued for their relative merits for the company vs the consumer, and injecting the word "socialist" - where there's absolutely no socialism happening in any literal sense , so you're invoking "socialism" as a metaphor for inefficiency in capitalism.

On its own, the subscription model itself can benefit or hurt consumers, consider

Composer cloud - can certainly benefit a certain type of beginner, effectively renting access to software that once cost 1000s of dollars in manageable instalments. It's not all that different from some of the micro purchasing schemes I've seen in parts of the developing world, and it can certainly be good for consumers. Significantly of course you can still buy the original products, and there probably aren't that many cases where there isn't a competing product that doesn't more or less the same thing.

Creative cloud, however, fundamentally different. It's only launched once the company has established an kind of natural monopoly, although this maybe isn't completely obvious at the time as its also right at the moment the extent of the other natural monopolies of silicon valley are just coming clearly into focus. Also - you can no longer buy licenses outright, and for technical reasons not necessarily involving actual functionality, there is often effectively no viable competition.

Now, I think this is a clear failure of market related to a new kind of monopoly dyanamic. It's a different kind of monopoly than Standard Oil, but I'd still argue that a kind of state regulation might well be the antidote because while it would be nice if consumers walking away would solve this issue through natural market processes, the nature of the web 2.0 monopolies (and the network dynamics therein) make it sometime hard for policy makers to get their heads around the nature of these monopolies.

So yes, I think you correctly perceive a failure or at least an efficiency of markets. And yes there are parallels to the dynamics by which inefficiencies appear in socialist systems. But as there's no pretence that any kind of socialist principle is at work here, invoking the word "socialist" to describe a perfectly normal capitalist market failure is really just using the work "socialist" as a metaphor of inefficient or disincentive.

(Leftists do this too, of course. There's a large stand of modern (post)-Trotskyism that dismisses the failures of the Stalinist regimes as "state capitalism" - which, at least arguably, is really just using the word "capitalism" as a metaphor for ruthlessness and cruelty.


So again, sorry if I've been needling you, but I think left or right, invoking the other team as a metaphor for what doesn't work in your own system only muddies discussions in unhelpful ways, and isn't really an argument one way or the other in good faith.


In any event, where this pontification might actually be relevant to us as consumers of sample libraries, is that, accepting the above analysis, the one place we see a threat of a creative cloud like model is from NI. Maybe they'll keep innovating and all will be good. But if Kontakt starts to update every year, and they move to a subscription model require, that's a concern.

That said, NI have generally been good citizens so I don't think there's any need to panic.

But except for maybe older VSL content, or pending the formation of a VSL - SF - OT cartel, I also don't think that subscription models make much sense to most of the industry at the moment.
 
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Also - you can no longer buy licenses outright

That's the problem, plus they're threatening to send militias in Black Hawk helicopters to break down your door and take away your old licenses.

Totally different from *offering* a subscription as one option.
 
That's the problem, plus they're threatening to send militias in Black Hawk helicopters to break down your door and take away your old licenses.

Totally different from *offering* a subscription as one option.

The helicopters are only one tiny part of everything that's wrong with creative cloud.
 
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