Adobe's subscription model

[Overgaard]

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7 hours ago, hansvons said:

 

Thanks for clarifying this, and I stand corrected. My information was based on what I learned before June, when Adobe issued a statement, claiming that they do not train their AI Firefly on user data/images. However, they do use AI to skimm trough their cloud searching for child porn, etc.

While I see the need to do this, I find it difficult to draw a line here, especially when considering the fact that Adobe did use the in 2015 acquired Fotolia cloud with silently upgraded user terms to train Firefly. I also learned in this article that Adobe also uses Adobe Stock for AI-training purposes without owning the images.

In my view, Adobe’s practices still seem fishy. 

Adobe does train their AI on Adobe Stock, so if one submit one's photos there in the hope to sell photos, they are (also) being used to train AI. I think it is a copyright breach. Same as is AI was trained in writing books by reading all books in the library and the bookstore. All is copyrighted material. 

Adobe also stated that they “will not use your Local or Cloud Content to train generative AI,” and in the same breath does state that they will use Adobe Stock to train Adobe Firefly. Currently, 13% of the content on Adobe Cloud is AI-generated content submitted by users/creators for sale. 

I don't see why Adobe would act as police scanning people's private photos. A naked child is a photo of your own child, or if looked at by others, it can act as child porn. But isn't that what Adobe does, look at you naked child? Adobe are going down an unsuccessful route tried by Twitter, Facebook, etc trying to be the police on keywords, images, subjects, thoughts. I highly doubt Adobe are concerned about the law or moral. They have other reasons to scan the Cloud and sort of already stated their intentions (before they withdrew them) 

Sally Mann gained international fame with her 1992 book "Immediate Family", and controversy as well because she photographed her own three children, and sometimes naked. 

 

 

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[SrMi]

53 minutes ago, Overgaard said:

Adobe does train their AI on Adobe Stock, so if one submit one's photos there in the hope to sell photos, they are (also) being used to train AI. I think it is a copyright breach. Same as is AI was trained in writing books by reading all books in the library and the bookstore. All is copyrighted material. 

Adobe also stated that they “will not use your Local or Cloud Content to train generative AI,” and in the same breath does state that they will use Adobe Stock to train Adobe Firefly. Currently, 13% of the content on Adobe Cloud is AI-generated content submitted by users/creators for sale. 

I don't see why Adobe would act as police scanning people's private photos. A naked child is a photo of your own child, or if looked at by others, it can act as child porn. But isn't that what Adobe does, look at you naked child? Adobe are going down an unsuccessful route tried by Twitter, Facebook, etc trying to be the police on keywords, images, subjects, thoughts. I highly doubt Adobe are concerned about the law or moral. They have other reasons to scan the Cloud and sort of already stated their intentions (before they withdrew them) 

Sally Mann gained international fame with her 1992 book "Immediate Family", and controversy as well because she photographed her own three children, and sometimes naked. 

I do not think that Adobe's CEO would like to be arrested next time he visits France.

I do not feel that Adobe is acting as police but as a company that follows the laws, or at least what its lawyers say is the law. 

Again, Adobe does not scan photos on people's local storage; they scan only on storage they "sell," and which could be used for illegal activities.

Adobe Stock differs from Cloud or local content, but I agree that Adobe should not be allowed to train its AI on images for which it has not been granted permission (almost all AI training seems to be done illegally). Here is another example of how technology moves faster than social norms or legal frameworks.

P.S. Maybe we should start a thread in Barnack's Bar instead of continuing the topic here.

Edited September 1, 2024 by SrMi

[Bobonli]

1 hour ago, SrMi said:

 

P.S. Maybe we should start a thread in Barnack's Bar instead of continuing the topic here.

Agreed. Pretty sure we've deviated from my best practice question at this point. 

[Jeff S]

17 minutes ago, Bobonli said:

Agreed. Pretty sure we've deviated from my best practice question at this point. 

Pretty easy to split, beginning with your essentially new query from post #13.  Just hit report button for mods.

Jeff

[Anbaric]

4 hours ago, jaapv said:

You are missing that Photoshop and Lightroom are basically professional software; there are plenty of excellent prosumer grade programs available. It is quite common for professional software in any field to be a subscription model. It is not primarily a turnover maximizer, but a means to ensure continuity, which is essential in the professional world.

There is no particular reason why 'professional' software needs to be on a subscription, and of course many LR/PS users are amateurs. The rental model has become increasingly popular with developers, for anything from trivial phone apps (I recently found my compass app wants me to subscribe) to heavy duty data crunching tools, simply because it's more profitable for the company and they get a continuous revenue stream. And why offer customers the choice, when you know that some of them will opt to purchase and rarely upgrade, if you are in a dominant enough position to make subscription the only option? Adobe aren't doing this for our benefit, but for theirs.

[Anbaric]

6 hours ago, Jeff S said:

I couldn’t care less about their cloud storage; don’t use it.  Ten bucks a month for LR Classic and Photoshop is a bargain for me nonetheless.  No addiction or squeezing involved.

Sure. But if they killed the (already less visible) $10 option in favour of the $20 option ('because most of our customers have embraced the cloud, we are no longer supporting the legacy plan'), would you still bite? This page used to feature the cheap Photography plan (£10 in the UK) prominently at the top:

https://www.adobe.com/uk/creativecloud/plans.html

Now it has been moved to a sub-page and the 1TB plan is featured instead (which reminds me a bit of the time when CS6 became harder to find on their site, before they nuked it). Maybe (hopefully) that's just a shift in emphasis, but maybe that's the direction of travel.

[Jeff S]

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27 minutes ago, Anbaric said:

Sure. But if they killed the (already less visible) $10 option in favour of the $20 option ('because most of our customers have embraced the cloud, we are no longer supporting the legacy plan'), would you still bite? This page used to feature the cheap Photography plan (£10 in the UK) prominently at the top:

https://www.adobe.com/uk/creativecloud/plans.html

Now it has been moved to a sub-page and the 1TB plan is featured instead (which reminds me a bit of the time when CS6 became harder to find on their site, before they nuked it). Maybe (hopefully) that's just a shift in emphasis, but maybe that's the direction of travel.

I’ve paid $10 since plan inception. Virtually everything else in my life costs more over time. Twenty bucks would still be a bargain. But if cloud storage becomes mandatory, then I will strongly consider switching, regardless of cost.

Jeff

Edited September 1, 2024 by Jeff S

[jaapv]

2 hours ago, Anbaric said:

There is no particular reason why 'professional' software needs to be on a subscription, and of course many LR/PS users are amateurs. The rental model has become increasingly popular with developers, for anything from trivial phone apps (I recently found my compass app wants me to subscribe) to heavy duty data crunching tools, simply because it's more profitable for the company and they get a continuous revenue stream. And why offer customers the choice, when you know that some of them will opt to purchase and rarely upgrade, if you are in a dominant enough position to make subscription the only option? Adobe aren't doing this for our benefit, but for theirs.

Well, my professional software is, and for my business the continuous monitoring, service and keeping up to date  that comes with a subscription.is a big plus. In fact, it is the rule rather than the exception. And it complies with legal maintenance obligations. You wouldn't want -for instance- an X-ray machine to run on outdated stuff and give you more radiation than needed, would you? Or getting the bill printed on a needle printer? Airlines lease their aircraft, large companies their car fleet, accountancy programs are subscription, so are data management programs, the professional list is endless - for good economic reasons  

Anyway, I prefer facts over supposition and conspiracy reasoning. 

1. Any professional is capable of judging whether the outlay is in balance with the product for his business. We don't need to drag them into this discussion - they can and will make their own decisions.
2. The photography subscription at something like 10-12$ a month (I don't know the exact current offer) is a pretty good deal for prosumers - add the price of a Photoshop licence to a Lightroom one and add the bl**dy expensive yearly updates; the subscription model is a steal and has saved me hundreds of Euros over the years. 
3. For those who want to cling to obsolete software and accept missing substantial IQ improvements (and I don't even mention new and exceedingly useful features), consider using software aimed at this group. Like Affinity, ON1, even Photoshop Elements - all are quite inexpensive, some even offer a choice between ownership and subscription, and are far better for their target customer base than some antique Photoshop iteration. And they will work on present day computers and the ones that are coming in the near future.

[Anbaric]

There's a certain irony in regarding those who still use things like CS6 (2012-2017) as 'clinging to obsolete software' on a forum where the M9 (2009-2012) gets a lot of love, many still regard a camera from the 1950s as Peak Leica, and some strange people like me are still using gear from the 1930s! Imagine if Leica had decided the firmware for the M9 should expire after a decade or so and the camera would no longer function. Surely the users would have had their money's worth by then, and should move on to something more modern? There would of course be an outcry, but this is more or less what Adobe has done by killing activation of earlier versions of CS, which would almost certainly work well on their current hardware and OS if they run Windows (I successfully tested the special activation-free CS3 installer on W11 a few weeks ago). And these 'antiquated' versions are in some respects more capable than today's competition, because Adobe have been making high quality software for a long time. When attempting to edit a PDF generated by a third party package a while ago, I found that Affinity Designer completely mangled it, but my 'obsolete' copy of Illustrator handled it perfectly well. 

Safety-critical applications are very much a red herring here. We would of course expect something like an X-ray machine to be on a service contract, though as an aside this specific example is perhaps an unfortunate one. In one of the most notorious cases of software failure, an established X-ray/electron beam radiotherapy machine with an excellent safety record, the Therac-20, was superseded by the Therac-25, which came with a new software suite touted as a great improvement on the previous control system. Presumably there was a maintenance contract on the machine, so we can regard its control program as 'subscription' software. Unfortunately the software turned out to be buggy, leading to a number of massive overdose incidents, some fatal, that went on for an 18 month period. But the lethal bugs had little to do with any particular business model, but rather with poor software engineering practices.

Car fleets, aircraft leases and massive accounting systems aren't terribly relevant here either. Before Adobe started the trend just over a decade ago, hardly anyone had the cheek to rent out desktop software, and their CEO Shantanu Narayen is very proud of his 'innovation' ("The world gives us credit for being the first major software company to transition from a desktop-based, perpetual-licensing business to a multibillion-dollar SaaS one."). You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to see how this benefits Adobe, you just have to do the maths. The biggest fans of the subscription system are mostly people who use both PS and LR (but no other Adobe software), and who would want to get every upgrade anyway. Fair enough. But that's only a subset of the Adobe user base. The people who were happy just to buy a 'perpetual' LR licence, maybe not upgrade it for years, and don't really care about PS, now find that they are spending the equivalent cost of that licence every 10 months or so. The people who used to buy the 'perpetual' licence for the popular Design Standard edition of CS (PS/Illustrator/InDesign/Acrobat) now find they are spending the same on just 18 months of CC. Since the old upgrade cycle was also about 18 months between CS editions, this means that those who only bought every other edition are now spending double what they used to. Those who bought only one edition in three (the horror!) are spending triple. Even the people who did upgrade to every CS DS release are a bit worse off than before, because they used to be offered discounted upgrade pricing. It would be naive to think that the bean counters at Adobe had not considered all this before they launched CC. Users failing to buy every new version because they didn't think the upgrades were worth it were a known 'problem' that subscriptions eliminate, in favour of a continuous, predictable revenue stream.

More generally, is there something about 'professional' software that means it only makes sense for it to be made available by subscription? I don't think so. Was Photoshop 'unprofessional' in the quarter century or so when licences were simply sold? Hardly. It worked then just as well as it works now, and users had the option of deciding whether to upgrade to the next version or spend their money on something else. Now they don't. Hardly anything I use at work is subscription software, incidentally, just some cloud-based stuff the boss buys in as a service. We do use MS Office 365 because our institution has a site licence, but my personal copy is on a 'perpetual' licence (still available from Microsoft today). The heavy lifting is done by FOSS packages, which in our area tend to be far more robust and flexible than anything in the proprietary world.

Edited September 2, 2024 by Anbaric

[Jeff S]

Simple, don’t subscribe.  It’s either worth it or not.

I’d recommend some professional therapy, but that will likely cost by the hour.

Jeff

[zeitz]

4 hours ago, Anbaric said:

Imagine if Leica had decided the firmware for the M9 should expire after a decade or so and the camera would no longer function.

My M9 no longer works and Leica won't fix it.  And I don't want digital Leica M cameras to become a subscription model.

[jaapv]

Quote

 

There's a certain irony in regarding those who still use things like CS6 (2012-2017) as 'clinging to obsolete software' on a forum where the M9 (2009-2012) gets a lot of love, many still regard a camera from the 1950s as Peak Leica, and some strange people like me are still using gear from the 1930s!

There is a difference between hardware and software - long gone are the days that Leica would upgrade your Barnack to a newer model..

If you think Adobe such a nefarious company I find it highly surprising that you even take an interest in their products and business model. There are plenty of competitors to switch to. 

The subscription model was introduced because half of the users were on cracked versions The budget  photography plan was meant to get all users on board and kill off the illegal use. Should they decide to drop it they  would lose my custom, and probably three quarters of their subscribers as well and they know it. 

[hansvons]

5 hours ago, jaapv said:

If you think Adobe such a nefarious company I find it highly surprising that you even take an interest in their products and business model. There are plenty of competitors to switch to. 

I’m not @Anbaric, but I do understand that subscription, aka renting, is not everyone’s preferred mode of using stuff. People buy houses, prefer to purchase their car instead of leasing it, and take pride in owning, even collecting Leica gear. 

The software world changed substantially in the last decade, and Millennials have become pivotal customers. They and my kids GenZ love renting. No long-time commitment is their preferred mode of consumption and being tied to the web all the time not a menace but a reassurance. 

To subscribe or not to subscribe is a cultural question. However, as culture changes, I fear that renting and not owning will be the future of services such as software, transport, and housing. For many Europeans, this transition is easier as they tend to live in rented flats. Owing a house is not the default for housing. On the contrary, one could argue that many of Europe’s educated classes, who live in large cities, tend to live in rented flats without the fear of status loss or the desire to buy a house in exurbs.

—-

I wouldn't say that there is plenty of competitors to Adobe LR. Out of curiosity, I tried Darktable, ON1, etc. and none of them are close to LR in UX and functionality. I would even say that Adobe’s photography plan is without competition in terms of price and applications. The only real competitor to LR is C1 and that is more expensive. Plus, they will inevitably move to subscriptions-only too, as they implement more and more AI-based tools, which require frequent updates or even permanent web connection.

.

[jaapv]

You should, in the light of the argument, compare those competitors to PS6. 

[250swb]

Just as an aside I do remember photo forums from the days when you'd buy Photoshop or Lightroom outright, then if you were diligent you bought the upgrades every six months. Ah, those were the days, forums clogged with 'my Lightroom doesn't work anymore, why should I buy the upgrade package!'. So it isn't only now people find things to be offended by, and while Adobe do from time to time deliver a bug in their software pretty much the last thing complained about with the subscription system is that the software stopped working or is no longer compatible with an operating system.

It would be a retrograde step to go back to outright purchase because you only get all the benefits until the next upgrade comes online which could be the day after you've bought it. And while cameras are now pretty much reaching a ceiling in usable everyday image quality there is already the crossover point when a software update can outdo a camera upgrade. Some of the newer denoise and up-sampling tools mean £10 a month looks cheap compared with constantly following the typical camera upgrade path.

Edited September 3, 2024 by 250swb

[hansvons]

58 minutes ago, 250swb said:

And while cameras are now pretty much reaching a ceiling in usable everyday image quality there is already the crossover point when a software update can outdo a camera upgrade. Some of the newer denoise and up-sampling tools mean £10 a month looks cheap compared with constantly following the typical camera upgrade path.

Good point!

[Anbaric]

11 hours ago, jaapv said:

If you think Adobe such a nefarious company I find it highly surprising that you even take an interest in their products and business model. There are plenty of competitors to switch to.

That's really the crux of the issue. I like the software, but not their business practices. I'm still a licensed Adobe user, and I'm perfectly happy with CS6 Design Standard, which was sold with a 'perpetual' licence. There aren't plenty of competitors for the whole suite, there is really just CC, at £57/month, or Affinity, which is lacking in some significant areas.

Pretty soon I'm going to be in the same position as CS4 users, who can no longer activate new installations. Already, I probably couldn't re-activate CS6 if my hard disk died before I had a chance to deactivate it, because Adobe now refuse to reset activation counts. One of the justifications for online activation, like the later subscription system, was to prevent piracy. But now the same system is being weaponised against legitimate customers, who find that the product they paid for has been taken away from them. So who, at this point, are the real software thieves?

16 hours ago, Jeff S said:

I’d recommend some professional therapy, but that will likely cost by the hour.

Can they also treat Stockholm Syndrome? But perhaps a lawyer would be a better investment when they switch off CS6 activation, though I understand they charge even more than therapists. I suspect Adobe are on pretty shaky ground when they deny access to purchased products. The EULA probably has some language that says they can do what they like, but that doesn't override local consumer law, which is quite strong in the UK and EU.

[jaapv]

Well, the legal reasoning will be that they did not switch anything off and consumer support is normally limited to ten years 

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[Anbaric]

Well, they switched off the activation servers for CS-CS4. They also removed the activation-free versions of CS2 from their website, as well as the page that allowed CS3 users to obtain similar installers by entering their product keys. Activation-free CS4 installers were never provided, which very probably means CS5 and CS6 installers won't be either, though I'd be very surprised if these don't exist internally at Adobe. It's interesting to compare what happened in practice with what they promised when product activation first came in with CS:

Welcome, dear visitor! As registered member you'd see an image here…

Simply register for free here – We are always happy to welcome new members!

The implication here is that perpetual really means perpetual. Even if Adobe ceased to exist, you would still be able to use the sofware you paid for! But Adobe does still exist and is now an extremely wealthy company with vast resources, yet its 'plans to honor these agreements' seem to have been casually discarded.

[roydonian]

Having learned and used CS6 back in the days when I was gainfully employed, I've been looking for a copy of the Windows version of CS6 for some time, but price being asked on the internet suggests that there are folks prepared to pay premium prices for this final non-subscription version. (For some reason, the price being asked for CS6 Extreme is fairly modest, but I'm not sure why this should be.)  When Adobe finally takes down the CS6 activation server, the bottom will presumably drop out of this particular market.

I note jaapv's point that Photoshop has been widely pirated - perhaps not surprising given its pricetag. Half of all users may be an underestimate. I remember during a photo outing a few years back hearing several younger members of the group discussing ways of bypassing Photoshop activation.

 

Edited September 3, 2024 by roydonian