Originally posted by alamo5000 I hope they get burned big time from every angle. I truly hope they go out of business. They will never get another penny of my money. Not one cent.
I'd be concerned if they went out of business... Adobe employs a lot of people, and those jobs are putting food on the table. Plus, a lot of people still depend on their products, hence why they choose to pay up.
That said... more and more, Adobe is starting to come across like Oracle did with its database software licensing in the 2000's. On the one hand, they're a publicly traded company and perfectly entitled - indeed, obligated, one might argue - to maximise revenue and profits therein for the good of shareholders... but they're alienating a lot of customers, big and small, in the process. Their products are absolutely top quality, which is why so many have shifted to the subscription model... but unless you're a heavy and/or very regular user, they don't work out cheap.
A big problem is that open source software is getting so much better. Darktable and RawTherapee are missing some of the convenience and commercial polish we see with Lightroom (for example), but in other respects they offer even more capability. Plus, they're remarkably stable these days, benefiting from high rates and relatively fast turn-around on bug fixing and new development. They're no longer buggy, slow, with poor user interfaces and weird ways of doing things. They work exceptionally well, hence the OP's observation:
Originally posted by Paul the Sunman Although inconvenient, the university will manage perfectly well without.
A lot of folks will reach that same conclusion with regard to their own relationship with Adobe. I did, when they first moved to its subscription model and I switched to Darktable. It was inconvenient, but I got over that soon enough. I still have Lightroom 6, and it's a great piece of software, but I'm so used to Darktable - and more recently, RawTherapee - that there's little I miss....