Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Adobe deactivates all Venezuelan accounts (adobe.com)
998 points by sndpsy on Oct 7, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 519 comments



What makes this even worse is that this is only a huge issue because Adobe moved to the whole 'Creative Cloud' thing rather than the old 'buy each product outright' model. With the old model, it wouldn't hurt these creators all that much if their accounts got deactivated, since the software would just not get updates.

Now on the other hand... they're screwed. It's a 'brilliant' example of how these 'cloud' based services are a bad deal for the user, because it puts them at the risk of getting locked out their own purchases due to legal hassles like this.


And if you've just paid your yearly prescription last week, you aren't even getting what you paid for:

> You’ve charged me, when will I get my refund?

>We are unable to issue refunds. Executive order 13884, orders the cessation of all activity with the entities including no sales, service, support, refunds, credits, etc.

So no refunds either. Renting stuff in the cloud is just waiting to be screwed if the country you're in is on the hit list of the US government. And that's not a short list either, btw.


The website changed:

>If you purchased directly from Adobe, we will refund you by the end of the month for any paid, but unused services. We are working with our partners on the same.

I wonder what caused this. Did something important change, or did Adobe just overreact at first?


Even that doesn't fix it. Sure they got their money back. But they aren't allowed to subscribe again so all of the files are locked away in proprietary formats.


That's something credit card chargebacks can be used for, at least in the US.


Aren't both Visa and Mastercard US-based and thus subject to the same executive order? So chargebacks are probably also at the whim of the US.


Credit and debit cards are specifically exempt from sanctions. That said, the card organizations may use sanctions as an excuse to not go forward with the chargeback process (as in, we will gladly take your money, but refund none of it because sanctions).


Chargebacks are initiated with the issuer's bank, which presumably would be in Venezuela.


That's kind of a two-way wammy.. If anyone owned money to VISA or Mastercard in Venezuela, the creditcard companies would not be able to collect those debts either?


I bet your bottom dollar they will be allowed to collect.


VISA and Mastercard don't (AFAIK) lend money themselves, unlike Amex for instance.


Consumer fraud lawsuits, and they don't want Venezuelan cash on their balance sheets.


This true. They have all discovered that the SaaS model is the best model for software sales —which is why the big players are all pushing everything into the SaaS model, which while convenient (financially and administratively), have drawback such as availability and of course the recurring nature of billing where you can’t choose to stay on an old version either because it’s good’nuff or because of compatibility reasons.

Yet, when google mail for business came out everyone hailed the idea; sigh... no more CALs, etc. which is true but now you have to pay recurringly (and msy have to keep former accounts live for compliance reasons)


> best model

I wonder how much recurring revenue Adobe just had wiped off their books.

What about when your government sanctions your biggest market?


I don’t see how shrinkwrapped SW would be a better revenue model. Whatever the sold already are in the books. At least with SaaS once sanctions are lifted they potentially have the market opened again. Also SW piracy isn’t unusual is places strapped for money. They surely wouldn’t get away with paying for Adobe SaaS with Petros (crypto currency).


Yeah, I got sick of Adobe's subscription model. Every release it seems like PS gets slower and slower without adding any features of value to me. I hate that if I want to have a certain combination of 2 or 3 apps I have to pay for basically everything which includes 80% of stuff I don't need. Paying $600/yr for something I only occasionally use a few times a month is a joke. I've since switched to Affinity.


Photoshop/Lightroom are $100/yr combined (sometimes less if you can get a deal on the subscription card). At that price, you're still looking at significantly less than if you used to upgrade your old software every 5 years.


If you wanted both Photoshop and Lightroom, yes. For those of us that just used Lightroom, and could use GIMP for any light editing, it's a significant increase. I'm still using my perpetually licensed copy of Lightroom 6, and I see no reason to upgrade any time soon. (I'll probably use the Adobe DNG converter as a free translator if I ever get a new body)


Capture One is another alternative to Lightroom. I've since switched to that after Apple abandoning Aperture. I still vastly prefer Aperture's UI, but it's barely usable anymore after several years of OS updates.


The new Dehaze and Texture sliders, plus improved highlight recovery are highly worth it. Also, the latest version is finally optimized and about 2-3x faster than all prior versions.


It's going to take more than some new features to make $100/yr worth it over $0/yr, but I see your point. I don't shoot as much as I used to; if I buy a new body at some point, I'll bite the bullet and do it.


Have you tried Darktable?


I've used the website photopea as an alternative to Photoshop, I find it much more similar and convenient than GIMP.


Tell me about it. I use only Lightroom for my personal needs, but I need to pay for PS as well even if I’ve never used it. I contacted their support a couple time about that and the chat person always become silent at some point.


You get the subscription offered by Adobe for 30 if you cancel the subscription.


How do you like the competitor offering so far?


I'm not parent but I'm still looking for a vector graphics replacement for Illustrator.

Sketch, Designer, etc, are all pretty crippled when it comes to working with groups instead of layers. Many people have asked for group isolation mode in Designer for years, but it's not really a priority for Serif.

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/1640-ad-is...

I tried developing a script for Sketch but the SDK doesn't provide the needed API to implement it properly and quite frankly Sketch is super slow once you work on complex projects.

The only software I've found that does groups well is a little software called Amadine, but it's still not very mature.

The team that develops PixelMator promised a vectors graphics software but are too busy with PixelMator Pro.

I haven't used Corel Draw in almost 20 years but now that they have a mac verson I will give it a try.

Affinity Photo is a great replacement for Photoshop though.


I've had a horrible time with finding good vector software for my needs, especially since my requirements tend towards needing it to create physical assets in the real world (laser cutting) or the basis for game assets.

There isn't any good constraint based / procedural vector software. Best I've able to find for my needs is Fusion 360 but it's really for 3D not for 2D. I want things to reflow automatically based on parameterized constraints and nothing does that except for Fusion 360 and/or OpenSCAD but those are both horrible for 2D vector.

I've even resorted to use React and SVG to dynamically generate vectored laser cut designs. https://github.com/brennancheung/lasercut-react-svg/blob/mas...

If anyone has any recommendations I'd love to hear them.


All the laser cutting job shops seem to use CorelDraw.

I do my designs in qcad, submit as a vector PDF, and the laser guys get that into Corel somehow. There might be some trickiness to the conversion due to how curves are represented in the PDFs? Maybe not. All I know is my parts come out fine.

I believe some people use Inkscape, but I found it unusably clunky. YMMV.


Laser cutter operator here.

Going from vector graphics to laser cut product is fucking painful when the design isn’t simple.

Parameterised constrains with sub-millimetre precision in a vector graphics app is the holy grail.


I do quite lot of laser-cutting (and a bit of mostly-planar CNC), and find FreeCAD to be quite practical for that. It is similar to Fusion360, in that it is a 3D CAD software - but primarily driven by 2d sketches with constraints. If your creations are rather "mechanical" in shapes, their constraint system should get you pretty far. Unfortunately the more "graphical" aspects, like text, Beziers etc. are not good. So I tend to use Inkscape for that, and import the vectors into FreeCAD. Would looove if FreeCAD got Inkscape-level usability for those workflows.

One can also do cross-object relationships using mathematical expressions. This can also be used to make eerything can driven form a single spreadsheet of input values.

Note that in FreeCAD you can always jump down to the Python scripting layer when you hit limits. Either directly (open View -> Panels -> Python console, then do an action in the UI), or using CadQuery: a OpenSCAD like eDSL for FreeCAD models in Python. For over 150 models I have done this twice.

Note that (semi)automated layout of a sheet for production, there is no good solution in FreeCAD right now. I am quite interested in plugging that hole, but don't have the resources for it at this time...


I'm quite happy with Autodesk Inventor. Though I get it a the student rate (for free), and would not pay for it since I just design simple things for 3D printing.


What is the process by which one goes from a cad file to actually something that can be 3d printed?

I recently got a new ipad pro and got this app sketchr3d and I was blown away by how intuitive it is to design really sophisticated structures. I tried blender on and off like 4 times over 5 years and found it basically impossible to use.

After making some really cool designs in s3d I started to wonder how easy it is to just print it with some kind of decent 3d printer model.

Is it really plug and play/drag and drop your file?


I didn't use Blender, but the way I understood it, it is more like modelling. Opposed to that, Inventor is technical drawing.

E.g. I could: Draw 2D plane 10x10 mm; extrude; on one surface, create a diagonal helper line; put three circles on that line; define diameter of one circle to be 2.5mm; constraint diameter of the other circles to be equal to the first; split the helper line at every circle intersection; constrain all line segments to be equally long - now all things are fully constrained. Negative extrude the circles (e.g. make holes into the first volume).

Should produce something like this:

   *---*
   |o  |
   | o |
   |  o|
   *---*
You can now change values (e.g. make the base plate 20x50mm and adapt the diameter to 4mm) and the program will keep rearrange everything according to the constraints, if possible.


(I don't have a 3D printer but I have been reading up on it recently.)

As sibling comment says, the design is saved as an STL file, a format they all use, which basically describes the shape of your print in a (variabally sized) load of triangles.

However, most use 'slicer' software on the computer as an intermediate step between the STL export from whatever CAD software your using before actually sending (specific instructions for your model) to the printer.

So, if you wanted to print directly from an iPad, my guess is that you'd need a model of printer that 'slices' STL itself, without desktop software. Even then, you'd probably need (a Lightning <-> USB adapter and) a USB drive to actually get the file from iPad to printer.


I haven’t played with 3d printers in a while, but my understanding is that they’ve pretty much standardized on the STL file format to describe prints. CAD packages should be able to export it, and printer software can read it.

Other than that, there’s likely a bunch of parameters that control the actual printing process— there are a lot of tradeoffs to make between print speed, material usage, part strength, etc. The printer software will ask you about these before starting a print.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STL_(file_format)


> I haven’t played with 3d printers in a while, but my understanding is that they’ve pretty much standardized on the STL file format to describe prints.

Not quite. The STL is the model. A slicer “slices” the model into tens to thousands of layers and creates a GCode file that tells the printer exactly what to do.


Generally speaking, the CAD software will output an STL file (surface geometry), then you import that into "slicing" software that takes the geometry and generates .gcode that is targeted specifically for your 3D printer.

I made a video about it here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDeCltdVU3w&t=1s


As others have said you export an STL file from your design software. This goes into a slicer (Slic3r, Cura, etc.) If you set up your printer with OctoPrint running on a Rasberry Pi you could do the slicing there, but you quickly run into the limitations of auto-slicing.


It depends.

I personally use Inventor, and there's a nice easy way to convert to STL's in the application.

You then take your slicer of choice (Cura is popular) and toss the STL in there, and click print.

Pretty close to plug & play.


This is what I use as well, plus repetier printing server on my old raspi B.

I've setup everything once about 2 years ago, and should probably update the toolchain (klipper is awesome).


I use Solvespace. http://solvespace.com/


Thanks for the recommendation. I'll check it out.


> I want things to reflow automatically based on parameterized constraints

Can you expand on that?

You mean like having a UI solver for drawing gears?


Not quite that detailed but along those lines. Usually it's simpler like resize a dimension based on another shape that is supposed to be in a fixed location. Vectors should snap and/or resize to other vectors based on midpoint, center, tangent, concentric, etc.

Other times there is constraint based solving going on. And other times there are simple formulae based on the dimensions of other vectors (think spreadsheet style reactive).


Not PS, but I use Affinity Designer now rather than Illustrator, and it is awesome. I love it.


But how to open old projects once one switches to non-Adobe applications?


Affinity does a pretty good job with .ai .ps and other Adobe formats.


Designer will import Illustrator files (.ai) and PDF files. It can also export to PSD and PDF (but not to .ai).

Photo imports (and exports) to PSD file format.

Some Photoshop features that aren't available in Photo (e.g. smart objects) won't be editable in the same way when opening a PSD in Photo, but you'll still be able to open the PSD file.

If you have a lot of Illustrator and Photoshop files, best to try them out in the Affinity apps to see if you're happy with the import feature.


It's pretty impressive. I wish there was scripting support though.


Funny enough, there is another issue with exactly this on another thread on the front page right now — Mac OS Catalina, which got released today, is killing the last remaining perpetual Adobe CS6 licenses available.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21184387

Bad day for Adobe. Or a good one? I'm not sure, but definitely an interesting one.


Good thing Microsoft is big on backwards compatibility. Hopefully CS6 will keep working on PCs for awhile longer. Sucks about Mac, though.


> Good thing Microsoft is big on backwards compatibility.

Well, was. They're pushing pretty hard on this evergreen "windows-as-a-service" thing.


This is just a different deployment and pricing scheme, you still get the same OS with same backwards compatibility.

Besides i do not see how they could do a "windows-as-a-service" offer without an OS, unless they convince every computer manufacturer to make their PC BIOSes a thin client for Microsoft's servers and you rent computing time/power from their datacenters running Windows (though even then, it'd still be Windows with the same backwards compatibility).

(of course all that sucks for us who want to buy a thing and keep it forever - or at least as "forever" as activation servers will allow you to - but i'm trying to ignore that aspect in this comment here)


Microsoft is so big on backwards compatibility they keep trying releasing new products locked to Store UWP software.


It also shows that Stallman was right from the beginning, it's just most people didn't believe such things could happen. The very basic right, the right to run the software, can be limited in an arbitrary way.


Honestly, it's not enough to just be able to run it. You need to be able to see it's source, and make modifications to it.

Not all software developers can handle all use cases that will be needed, and it's unrealistic to say, "if the use case is needed enough there would be market forces to implement it".


This comment says "Stallman was right" regarding the cloud. Not "Stallman was right about Marvin Minsky."

This is an argument people can't distinguish the man from the idea, or his software, or his organization, etc.


Well let's talk Minsky since you wanted to bring it up. Minsky and Stallman were long term friends. Minsky is dead and can't defend himself. Stallman, when directly asked about Minsky, said he didn't believe Minsky knew the girl was a sex slave, and Minsky believed the sex was consensual. It's a fair comment by Stallman. Legally it's also irrelevant since believing sex is consensual when it's not doesn't matter. Also there's the issue of it being statutory rape as well, age of consent in Virgin Islands is 18. But Minsky's dead so he can't be prosecuted for either charge anyway. Did Minsky know he was a rapist? Maybe not, Stallman points out. Fair enough. Was Minsky legally a rapist? Almost certainly so. Would have been a good follow up question to Stallman so he could clarify his thoughts. Are Stallman's opinions here objectionable? I don't find them so. Worth annihilating the reputation and life of someone who is possibly the most productive software developer in history? I think not.


I don't particularly want to engage further with what I consider a pure smear campaign, but it seems fair to at least take the time to share the information with you that the woman's deposition mentions she was 'directed to' have sex with Marvin Minsky, but not that she actually did, and there is an eyewitness testifying that Minsky turned her down.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20909030

I don't find anything objectionable about Stallman's opinions here either. Quite the contrary in fact.


So all this sad show is based on false reporting about something that Stallman didn't say about something that Minsky didn't even do.

I don't know how the people who caused this can look at their reflection in the mirror with a straight face.


I wonder how many people even know what Stallman said about Minsky. Most of the media I read reported incorrect summaries that leave out critical details.


Unless I'm missing something your comment (and the replies to it) are the only mentions of Minsky in this entire thread?


I'm guessing the comment had initially started to fade, but people have voted it back up since then?


It’s own vs rent and the internet has enabled tech firms to operate as rent seekers. I personally think owning is the way to go for important things, but many people don’t see the distinction any more.


Hence the benefit of open source products. Imagine if everyone who bought a photoshop subscription supported some great open source software. They’d get dividends on their investment as equal owners of the software!


This is particularly brutal because for many Venezuelans, online freelancing work is their only way of accessing US dollars, which is their only way of accessing basic necessities. The quantities of dollars here are so low they would make your head hurt -- so places like Fiverr, while seeming like a place to do garbage work to someone in San Francisco, can be a near-literal lifeline to people with no access to other means of income. Fuck you Adobe


To be fair, and whether you agree with it or not, the point of the executive order was to screw them in this manner. So, it's a feature not a bug as far as the government is concerned.


That's parent's point. Cloud software puts you at the mercy of the vendor's government on an ongoing basis.


Cloud software has mostly been for the benefit of the company compared to the end-user.


Cloud software (especially iOS apps) has resulted in a huge decline in time I spend doing tech support for family/friends. It’s nice when stuff just works. Although, I agree, the subject of this thread is a huge drawback.


There are always benefits to sweeten the pill :-P


Exactly. People don't understand why I want to buy boxed software and deadwood books and have all my music downloaded (after legal purchase) only.


Well you can still buy downloadable DRM-free software and DRM-free (or DRM-freed :-P) ebooks just like your music (which i thin it is much easier and space effective).

That is what i do myself - i avoid anything with DRM (exceptions are some games that i wait for price drops to around the price of a coffee) and store everything on my external HDD.


Yeah, like how Microsoft's HUP program used to let me buy full offline office through work for $15. Awesome deal.

A few months ago they discontinued that model and now I can get Office 365 at a discounted annual price. The enraging part was the email where they spun it like this change was great for me and that HUP is way better than it was before. What a crock, SaaS for consumers is cancer.


Other little things too. A long standing bug/limitation of PowerPoint Mac is that you can't embed fonts in a presentation. So you literally can't create a presentation on a Mac and know that it will display correctly on another machine.

The ticket was closed as 'fixed/implemented' with the launch of the most recent version of Office - but you can only embed fonts if you have an Office 365 account.

Its becoming 'subscribe to unlock basic features'.


You can also wait for three years for Office 2021 ;)


I agree with your core point, but I think it would be unfair to avoid noting some of the clear ways that SaaS has benefited users.

Accessibility: Individuals/businesses who couldn't afford a large, upfront expenditure for software but can afford the smaller, monthly expense now have access to the best tool for the job.

Flexibility: for sporadic consumers ("I use Photoshop/Illustrator once a year to make my Groundhog Day card"), the ability to subscribe for the one month of the year they use the product and subsequently cancel is incredible.


The only benefit is in their marketing department and Adobe's bottom line. If you wanted to use photoshop once a year, you could download the trial version. (Let alone that adobe's apps are no easy to learn toys - you can't just use them once a year). I 'll give it 1 year before we start looking back at SaaS as the abomination that it is.


The I use this software once a year use-case was handled with free trials.

For the limited number of companies who need to spread out a 1000 dollars or less over a year putting it on a credit card would be the cheaper option over the year.

The only groups that benefits is those who want to access the product from many locations/computers or the one who doesn't want to install anything.

Those are two big groups.


Yep, it's the flip side of the cloud coin: you're no longer in control [of the thing you just bought]. Average users don't fully appreciate the distinction, until events like this underscore it.


> Now on the other hand... they're screwed.

No, it just means adobe created a whole new fleet of pirates.


We should've listen to RMS about Free Software huh?


they're not screwed if they know how to use thepiratebay. this isn't a hard problem to solve for the technically competent.

am I being blithe about this? I don't think I am, but feel free to inform me if I'm missing something.


The issue now is everything associated with their "Creative Cloud" account; artwork layers saved to use throughout the programs, etc. – not as catastrophic as the update itself, but redundant for sure. Publicly, their Behance profile going down is probably where it hurts most.


And this is why I stopped using Adobe. Unfortunately, they've made so much more money milking their users than the customers they've lost so cloud stays.


Yes, we buy access only in many cases, not the actual product that can be used offline. You rent e-books, games, movies, songs, and even photos. In many cases if your account gets deactivated (please, do not assume that it will not, it can for arbitrary reasons, be it political or anything else), you will not be able to use the product. You cannot even play single player games without running Steam. Jeez.


Yep. I haven't upgraded since CS6. It still does everything I need it to do. I probably would have upgraded by now though if it was even possible to just buy a newer version, as there are some nice-to-have features the newer versions have. But at least I don't have to worry about dumb crap like this.


On the other hand if you wanted to get in the business as a freelancer you had to put all the money in upfront.

Being able to pay as you go with no long term commitments can be liberating as well.


So you might have both options...

But companies do not seem to realise this.


> It's a 'brilliant' example of how these 'cloud' based services are a bad deal for the user

It's a brilliant example of why proprietary software is bad for the user - how do users make sure their software doesn't have a kill switch? How do they ensure it doesn't phone home to validate their license?


not true, every adobe aplication have "portable" version and is installed on the host machine not cloud, they will loose cloud assets but apps will be fine


Or if the company goes bust or discontinues the product.


I mean these ‘cloud’ based services are also a good deal for users, too. Don’t overlook that.

Everything’s a trade off.


"It's a 'brilliant' example of how these 'cloud' based services are a bad deal for the user..."

I've understood the whole point with SaaS software is that corporate buyers prefer operational expenditure to capital expenditure. It's not about an evil plot to screw consumers more. It's a strategy to charge corporate clients in a way that they like.


I thought the point was that the software was already so good that people would want newer versions less and less, so they had to change the business model to get a steady revenue.


You are correct, but they force the same purchase type on all consumer, rather than let people decide.


Back in high school, my best friend wanted to have a legal copy of Photoshop (we were broke kids and pirated everything back then). He eventually found a copy of Photoshop 2 on eBay for cheap, got it and it's CD key and then purchased the upgrades to eventually get to Photoshop 5. I think he was able to pull it off for under $100 or pretty close (I think it retailed for like $300~$400 back then?).

I too miss when you owned a copy of the software, licensed to a single machine, that was on a physical transferable medium. Jetbrains at least allowed a fallback license, which Adobe doesn't have (and honestly that's because Jetbrains couldn't get away with that shit with a tech focused customer base).

Take about crippling certain business in Venezuela. All this is going to do is encourage piracy (and potentially malware).


> I too miss when you owned a copy of the software, licensed to a single machine, that was on a physical transferable medium.

I only purchase music on CDs and vinyl. In each case I legally have the right to listen to the music forever, and even can sell the album if I tire of it.

Digital downloads are not that way at all and because of that I will never buy one. Likewise with ebooks.

I also will never personally purchase software on a subscription model.


Why are digital downloads not similarly 'forever'? Do WAVs and MP3s have DRM capabilities? Asking legitimately - for any new vinyl that I buy I use the download codes that come with albums rather than ripping them manually, as it's very convenient for e.g. listening at work.


There’s nothing wrong with digital music from a “keep it for life” perspective, as long as you’re on top of your backups.

WAV and MP3 do not have DRM capability. Even music purchased through iTunes has been available DRM-free for a decade [1].

For example, I’ve got a lot of albums, bought through Bandcamp, which I downloaded as FLAC and burned to CDs. Same quality as a retail CD, and no one can take it from me without physically stealing it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Store#Digital_rights_ma...


>Same quality as a retail CD

Not the same "overall" quality, to be honest. Burned CDs have much shorter life.


but since he owns the 100% digital copies this ain't a concern, he can burn them again (not very ecological TBH, I've would rather put it on some big storage player)


In each case I legally have the right to listen to the music forever

In many jurisdictions, you still have that right. You just have no legal way to exercise that right.


If he bought it off eBay, it's not a legal copy in the USA. Software is licensed, not sold; and software licenses are nontransferrable.


That doesn't seem to be the case since 2009: https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=148be5c9-c0d4... (or at least it was properly tested then)

Has anything changed since then? It seems Adobe CC was created not long after, so... maybe not a coincidence?


That decision was overturned on appeal. Vernor v. Autodesk was the specific case I had in mind.


Thank you for the reference! It was quite eye-opening.

This is the Wikipedia page about the case (to make it easier for others):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_v._Autodesk,_Inc.


A (somewhat) serious question: since Autodesk, Adobe, etc. can use Shrinkwrap/Clickwrap/Browserwrap to distinguish between a sale and a license what's stopping users from doing it right back?

What if my browser sent custom headers to Adobe saying that by serving me a webpage Adobe has agreed to sell me, not license, a copy of each new edition of any software they release for $1 in perpetuity and that a breach of contract would result in liquidated damages of $10,000 per undelivered copy.

If I'm bound by Adobe's Terms of Service before I've had a chance to read them by nature of the my browser's request then surely Adobe would be similarly bound to my Terms of Servers(TM) by nature of their response?


Wouldn't work, as custom headers are not reviewed by a person at any point.

If I'm bound by Adobe's Terms of Service before I've had a chance to read them by nature of the my browser's request then surely Adobe would be similarly bound to my Terms of Servers(TM) by nature of their response?

You're not bound until you have had the opportunity to review the TOS. Meaning that merely accessing a page from somewhere else (i.e., a link or url) isn't enough--but once you're on (or revisiting) their website, if you interact with it in any matter beyond visiting the TOS page the TOS would apply even if you chose not to read it.


Right of first sale overrides that, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine

Of course, the person selling the software would be in trouble if they put the physical media up for sale without deleting all local copies.


Vernor v. Autodesk essentially removed the right of first sale for shrink wrap licensed copywritten works.


Adobe licenses are transferable. Here is their support page for people who want to transfer software licenses from one person to another:

https://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/policy-pricing/transfer-...


It might have been an unopened box... I did something similar with an old copy of Adobe Premiere that I got on clearance for a couple of bucks, then upgraded.


> (we were broke kids and pirated everything back then)

Why brag or joke about that? And why does it matter if you were 'broke kids'?

> Take about crippling certain business in Venezuela. All this is going to do is encourage piracy (and potentially malware).

Do you understand what is going on here? Adobe is complying with a government order. And the government issued it in order to achieve an objective in a country where I believe (I only know what I see and read) there are significant problems.

> All this is going to do is encourage piracy (and potentially malware).

Apparently they have no supplies in hospitals and rampant inflation. They have much bigger issue than piracy and malware.


> Why brag or joke about that? And why does it matter if you were 'broke kids'?

You may have been reading too far into this. It sounds to me like a statement of fact, not a brag or a joke.

> Apparently they have no supplies in hospitals and rampant inflation. They have much bigger issue than piracy and malware.

Having a job is part of the solution, and the use of software is part of many jobs that have international value (i.e. from countries whose currency is not inflating rampantly).


Don't pretend like the US government has a good justification for this. It's purely another attempt to destabilize the country even more.

The entire purpose of these sort of sanctions is to hurt the public enough that they start putting pressure on their government to make a change that the sanctioning government wants. In this case the US wants Venezuela's government to be replaced with one who would be more friendly to US oil companies taking all of their oil and paying a small portion of it's value to the politicians who allowed them in.

The main reason Venezuela has been solvent up til now is that they have a lot of oil, which the government sells and uses to pay for social programs. But since the price of oil went down they've been having some money trouble. Combine that with the fact that Maduro knows as much about monetary policy as Trump knows about tariffs and you've got a deflating economy that's only made worse by sanctions, which again, is their entire purpose. They are specifically trying to ensure that Venezuela's government collapses so that US companies can move in and rob the region of it's resources.

Don't get me wrong, the best thing Venezuelans could do is probably throw Maduro out on his ass, but replacing him with some US-friendly bootlicker is worse than no solution.


As a Venezuelan I disagree, I can tell you that the people here dream of the day when a US military intervention takes place and the US(or really anyone not communist) take the country.


Mh that is not really my experience of talking with Venezuelians in Colombia. At all. They sure want Maduro out but certainly don't want the US in, that would be the recipe for ending up like El Salvador in 10 years.


What a coincidence I'm in Colombia too, Anyway I'm not saying that everybody wants to be a US colony but that is a better alternative than the status quo.

I can tell when you don't have electricity, gasoline, water or food anything is an improvement.


Worth noting that there's a decent alternative to Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign from Affinity:

https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/

Affinity is European, and thus not affected by the executive order. Also, all of their products are buy-once-own-forever.


And if you want an alternative to Adobe Premiere, I highly recommend DaVinci Resolve. Free for most features, then just a one off payment of $299. One of the industry leaders in colour grading and has a composition suite (acquired from DFX Fusion) built right in.


I started using Davinci Resolve a few years ago and its fantastic! It seemed too good to be true, and I kept waiting to find some dark secret or "catch" but nope, it's just really good software priced reasonably.


DaVinci Resolve by Blackmagic Design. Such a pretty sounding set of names. It feels a lot more like the future I was hoping for.


I love Resolve/fusion, plus it has a Linux client


Thanks. I didn't know about DaVinci yet. It looks impressive (including their website).


Thanks for the hint! Any experience with high FPS footage? My old Premiere version I still have around works fine for regular 30/60 fps footage, but 240 FPS stuff it just can't handle properly.


Good question, but sadly I don’t know. I know there a way to optimise your clips for editing to keep performance up. A bit like Proxies but I think simpler. Not sure if that applies to high FPS footage.

Since it doesn’t cost anything, it might be worth giving it a test.


Gave it a try and it works really good (though my old computer seems to reach it's limits). Thanks again!


Resolve is pretty nice. It still has 4k/HighDPI scaling issues (it's based on QT5 under the skin) that make things too large on some screens, but other than that it's pretty solid.


Yup. Davinci is what we use for our VR video production part.


Seconded, I am not at all knowledgable about video editing but had to do some stuff which was beyond the capabilities of iMovie and was impressed by Resolve. It’s fairly complex and the UI is pretty non-standard (true of many “creative”/media applications) but fairly logical and there’s loads of help online. Plus it’s free if you don’t need larger than 4K export!


I would love a real alternative to Lightroom. I'm stuck on version 6, since I refused to go to the rent it model.


I think Capture One Pro is superior to Lightroom in everything but the library system that is offered with Lightroom, though what is provided in Capture One Pro is still very good.

https://www.captureone.com/en/store


I always found the library system in Lightroom to be painful only because of how slow it is. It's hard to imagine enough features to make up for a UI that routinely takes >1s to render images onto the page.


That's what got me to switch off Lightroom, and Capture One's excellent other features kept me on the latter. Highly recommended.


I never got into the catalogs/sessions way of managing my library but Capture One is my favourite processing tool. So I use digiKam to manage my library and Capture One to process the individual photos.


Interesting. Capture One is a non destructive photo editor: how does that not force to use Capture One for managing your library as well? Is digiKam able to access the post-process images from Capture One?


I don't care as much about seeing the unedited thumbnail previews in digiKam as long as I can find what I'm looking for, and then edit and print from Capture One.


Capture One looks great but it's way more expensive than Lightroom. Lightroom is $120 a year. Capture One is $500 and $150 for an upgrade between versions or $240 a year.


Note that you can buy edition that are limited to one maker (Fujifilm or Sony) for quite a bit cheaper than the whole package. Combined with semi-regular sales/promo code (check the fujirumors or sonyrumors website), you can get a perpetual version for very interesting price: I reckon having bought the Fujifilm edition for about 125$.

You do have to commit to camera brand though.


This. I got my Sony license for $50.


I was just about to post Capture One!!


Same, recently heard about Darktable, planning to give it a shot now that I don't have Lighroom anymore

https://www.darktable.org


Darktable is abysmal, sadly. It is my go-to example for the failure of f/oss to fulfill common professional software needs.


Affinity is "thinking about" a digital asset management tool.

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/78025-when...

If they do make one, it may or may not have editing features built in (vs shipping you out to Affinity Photo).

But I'm in the same boat. Stuck on CS6, couldn't stand DarkTable, haven't bothered trying any other alternatives.


(I'm building a DAM: check my profile if you'd like to be part of the closed beta!)


I'm interested, but whatever DAM I eventually move to will in large part be driven by how well it can import my years of Lightroom library (including edits out of the xmp sidecar files and at least approximating Lightroom's RAW rendering). I know that's a big ask, don't suppose it's on your roadmap?


The current version added support for importing sidecar metadata. It does not apply LR edits to the previews it shows, though (which would require re-implementing swaths of LR...).

If you see something you want when you try the beta, please tell me!


I imported a 70k item library into mylio and it ingested it fairly well, along with the xmp sidecar files. I try to avoid doing edits on my images, so I haven't tested how well it imports throughly although.



I can't quite recommend Luminar over Ps/Lr because i've never used the latter, but Luminar seems good enough, and it also seems to be getting better.

I've been getting into photo editing recently, and searched online for a few hours to learn about the differences between the various options. From what i gathered, Luminar (which is a pay once for a lifetime license that you can have installed in up to five machines at a time) is a serious contender to Ps/Lr even at the professional level, let alone at the amateur/occasional user level.


I moved from Lightroom to Capture One Pro and eventually settled on Darktable.

It took a bit of getting used to (still not a fan of the UI and its obsession with "film rolls" every time I import something) but once I did it's quite nice. Images come out looking good and it has a handy Lua scripting environment and CLI with which you can automate many tasks.



Have you tried AfterShot Pro by Corel? I don't use it, but that's just because I still use (and love) Bibble 5 from 2011, which is the software that was bought by Corel and turned into AfterShot Pro. I had a quick glance at the manual of the latter, and it seems like the batch processing and other things are still intact, so I'm hopeful it still might be worth checking out.


I actually feel Adobe’s Photography Plan is pretty good value. LR Mobile on iPad is excellent, worth it for that alone


Indeed. I used to use LR Classic on my Mac, but since the new LR got more and more features I switched to using my iPad almost exclusively. I don't think I used LR on my Mac in months.


Have you tried ON1 Photo Raw?


Have you considered Polarr?


That appears to be just the editor part. The asset management in LR is really what I use most.


There's also a sale currently on Affinity Photo if you go to https://www.ephotozine.com/article/50--off-affinity-photo-so...

They usually do a black friday sale but you can get it here for half price.


Hmm. How good are they with the "grunt work" stuff for professional print design? Color profiles, PDF export, scripts for text formatting, files loading a gigabyte worth of photos, etc? I'm desperately waiting for a proper Adobe replacement but they're sitting on that segment, not with flashy, new features but with a solid-as-hell base of tried and tested background functionality.


Affinity convert on Windows here.

Profile support is fine, compatible with ICC profiles, does soft proofing and black point compensation. You'd have to go into more depth about your use cases as I know Adobe let some wild stuff happen, but if you just need to use and embed profiles and soft proof, you can do that.

Its PDF export is good, not great—again, Adobe allows for extreme granularity in PDF settings so I'd need to know specific use cases to advise. PDF import and placing PDF docs is surprisingly good, in some case shockingly so. If you're publishing books built from scratch in Affinity Publisher, there's nothing off the top of my head that I had to fundamentally change about my workflow in shipping 4-color books with layered artwork and columnar text with sidebars to prepress. If you're editing PDFs or converting from INDD, you can get away with a lot but you need to be careful since there are a few feature gaps (see the next paragraph in particular) that don't convert well or at all.

What you'll miss the most falls under what I think you mean by "scripts for text formatting". Publisher doesn't do grep styles or anything similar enough to replace that. It's the biggest feature I miss regularly. You'll miss the level of automation complexity and droplets in Photo too if you use those regularly in Photoshop.

I don't have any problems with large or complex layouts loading huge amounts of data for artwork, or massive text docs.

What I get that I didn't have in Adobe, and especially InDesign: pretty much full access from any of the component apps to vector drawing tools, raster and vector brushes, and shape tools, all of which behave consistently across the suite. No more having to flip my brain from Illustrator's vector drawing to Photoshop's to InDesign's, they all just work with each other and the same way, copy and paste across each other without any fuss, edit within each other easily when necessary, etc.

I miss some power features, especially around styles and Photo automation, but I've adapted, and I appreciate the hell out of how well-integrated the three apps are with each other in interface and functionality.

The forums are a good place to ask about or research feature implementations and requests, especially https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/forum/52-feature...


I use Affinity Designer all the time. I bought Affinity Photo but when I actually had to do real work a small nit made me go buy a Photoshop license. That nit was I had several hundreds PNG files I needed to edit. In PS I double click the PNG in the Finder/Explorer, the file opens in Photoshop, I edit, if I added layers I Ctrl/Cmd-Shift-E to collapse them then Cmd/Ctrl-S to save and it saves back to the .PNG. Affinity can only save to non Affinity file formats via "Export" which is brings up one or more serial dialogs and save as file selector. That minor difference was enough to make it worth it for me to pay Adobe $120 to save me from hours of tedium. I mean $120 is not "that" much money and so it was worth it for me to save me even a little frustration. Others have complained about this workflow issue to Affinity but I think so far it's fallen on deaf ears.

I know it's a minor nit and few people will probably care but it's annoying enough for people used to being able to more quickly edit screenshot .PNGs and or .JPGs that I hope Affinity listens eventually. Because of that though I've never gotten used to Affinity Photo where as I'm pretty happy with Affinity Designer


Agreed, across the board it's the automation features that I miss the most. Macro recording is about all they offer, and while you can do some batch runs I haven't been able to replicate anything but some pretty simple actions.

They seem to be focused on Photoshop plugin compatibility over other features at the moment, which is good for some specialized workflows, but I really want better automation in the whole suite.

I'll at least say the lack of automation has finally pushed me to learn more about what I can do with the likes of imagemagick, but the feature-specific use cases like you bring up will be a gap until they fortify those automation features.


Thanks! I'm starting to warm up to the idea of actually giving this a try!


Been using both designer and photo for about 2 years, to replace Photoshop mainly. While mostly great, some features are missing for vectors which makes layers broken down into tiny bits instead of groups.

The only way to solve it is to open the file in illustrator and save it as an .ai file to fix it. I've been told it works in Corel draw as well.


Not affected now, but being non-US is not a guarantee. Many European companies would like to trade with for example Iran, but can't since they also have a big market in the US, so they can be targeted.


If only it ran on Linux... I hate having to reboot to Windows to edit photos.


If you are on a desktop, you can dedicate a graphics card to windows and run it with PCIe pass through into a VM. Best of both worlds.


What's wrong with GIMP? Are there special abilities and features in Photoshop GIMP does not have?


Yes, there's a lot of stuff the GIMP doesn't have, but mostly it's just the annoying UX. I'm sure half of it is just that I'm used to Photoshop, but I'm also pretty sure the other half is GIMP.


I'm not sure how I haven't seen these before. Those apps look great! I've tried sketch, but it just feels too far from the adobe world I'm used to, especially for raster graphics work.


I own a copy, but it doesn’t handle plugins not nearly as nice as photoshop.


Have you tried Publisher? How does it compare to InDesign?


I bought it and use it, yes.

It's missing some features that InDesign has and is a little slower, but it's a solid workhorse for laying out books and documents. I don't miss InDesign at this point.


Interesting. The near universal use of Microsoft Office--along with the later various SaaS products--really hollowed out the publication layout market between word processors that were pretty mediocre at layout and high-end design tools that mostly meant InDesign.

(And Scribus always seemed a steep learning curve too.)

I don't have a need at the moment but good to know there are still some tools that may make sense for more casual users.


Disagree. Designer doesn't hold a candle to Illustrator. I'm still on CS6, the last version before CC. Even that version, released in 2012, is superior to today's Affinity Designer.

I haven't explored the other ones as deeply but from what I have done, the features seem quite limited. For example, there's a translator for Photoshop plugins to work on Affinity Photo. Very very few plugins work with this translator. Why is there even such a middleware? Because the Affinity plugin ecosystem is very weak.

It's an alternative, not a "decent" alternative. It's the equivalent of Google Docs vs Microsoft Word. If you need something barebones, it gets the job done, and there are a few things it does better. But if you need just one feature of the better software, forget it.


I have Affinity Designer and Photo and disagree with your assessment. You're right that Affinity apps do not match all the features of Adobe's apps, but Designer and Photo are well above "bare bones" in comparison. I'd say that Photo's biggest missing feature is an equivalent to Photoshop's smart object feature.

As a former user of Illustrator, there's nothing I miss from that app, certainly not the clunky Illustrator UI. (Unfortunately, Designer also has some clunky aspects to it's UI.)

Anyone, who wants to make up their own mind about the Affinity apps can download a free trial from their website - the apps work on both Windows and Mac.

Also, take a look at the 'spotlight' section of the Affinity website to see some of the work possible with the apps.

https://affinityspotlight.com/articles/recent/


> Anyone, who wants to make up their own mind about the Affinity apps can download a free trial

Because the discussion is not whether Affinity apps are good or not, but whether they are good relative to Adobe, anyone that wants to make up their own mind also can download a free trial of CC apps.


> Designer doesn't hold a candle to Illustrator

Where does it fall short for you? Out of interest.


Pantone swatches, image trace, artboards, plugins are the 4 biggies. Especially plugins, of which I have a large variety and many custom scripts.

One other thing that stands alone and is absolutely critical, that would seem to work in Designer but doesn't, is export for embroidery. It is a quirk of my local shop but there is no vector export format from Designer that my shop can use. They end up importing ("digitizing") a jpeg. This causes many more steps in the approval workflow. With Illustrator I just export an eps and they import that and it comes out perfect basically the first time. Obviously Designer can export eps but the software on the other side doesn't like it. (And even though their software can handle native illustrator, import of that doesn't work either. Has to be eps, from Illustrator, not Designer.) I'm 100% sure it's their crap embroidery software (I mean, they are using win95 if that indicates anything), but it is what it is. It's especially odd because embroidery is very low resolution. jpeg should be perfectly fine!! I just get way better final results with the eps flow.

That embroidery issue doesn't come into my evaluation of the goodness or not of Designer as a standalone tool. I just mention it because it does affect me and I think it's an interesting point to bring up. I'm sure many many people are dependent on Illustrator for similar workflow/pipeline issues. It doesn't make the software good or bad, but does create the dependence.

I think the issue people have is they get insulted when you say the software they enjoy to use is not very good. But there are 2 kinds of good. Absolute and relative. Relative to Illustrator, Designer doesn't compare. That is my critique.

There are some things I do like very much about Designer. Personas. Slices. SVG support is much better (keep in mind tho I'm stuck on CS6). These things, however, do not begin to challenge Illustrator.

I understand why Serif would want to stand apart with their own feature set, but now I find myself using 2 tools. Oh how I, and many other non-professional users, would love to replace Illustrator.

Keep in mind, I believe I am in the target demographic for Designer. I am an occasional user, not a daily use professional. The price and pricing model is perfection. The ease of use is perfection. I dare say that the online userbase/forums and free tips and help you can get are much much better. But the lack of features is saddening.

It's interesting because Serif (the company) does not compete with Adobe (the company), even though at a surface level they would appear to. The cost difference between Illustrator and Designer is worlds apart. Maybe this is why they don't work on feature parity. They don't want to be on Adobe's radar.

With Catalina, I'm soon going to have to bail on Illustrator. I'll probably have to invest some time in Inkscape. I could pirate CC or I could use CS6 in Windows VM (again, technically pirating although many would justify it), but I'm not that person.



Inkscape is one of the best examples of open source done well (make sure to use the latest version if your distribution bundles an old one); even when I still had (pirated) versions of Adobe I preferred Inkscape over the Adobe offerings.

Audacity is another great program from experience, and the success of Blender speaks for itself.

Gimp, on the other hand, is a UX nightmare. There's a tutorial on how to draw a line, and you'll need it, because it requires a non-discoverable keyboard shortcut. Its feature set is either ages behind Photoshop, or there but non-discoverable due to bad UX, and the UX makes basic tasks excruciatingly painful.

Photoshop and IrfanView are the two tools I miss most from Windows, the latter even more than the former. Trivial tasks like "crop picture in clipboard and put it back on the clipboard/into a file" are pure pain on Linux, because the only thing that at least works reliably is Gimp with its horrible UX. One of the "lighter" (Paint.NET equivalent) tools left parts of its UI in my saved image. Others don't support the clipboard. IrfanView with Wine just isn't the same either.


> Gimp, on the other hand, is a UX nightmare.

I always wondered about Gimp. I use it all the time, but for VERY basic things. But anytime I want to do ANYTHING, even like just add a word to an image or draw a line, I need to go Google how to do it. The newest version seems better, but the UX is just crazy.


I'm starting to think GIMP's problem is that it is too similar to Photoshop. People open GIMP, see a different dialog for the exactly same thing in Photoshop and go "this UX is a nightmare". They don't approach it as a new piece of software that they have to learn how to use effectively.

As a counterexample to all the GIMP bashing in this thread, I'm using it extensively, don't find its interface crazy and in rare occasions that I use Photoshop or PaintShop Pro I find that my experience in GIMP translates reasonably well.


I have never, ever used Photoshop, and have used Gimp since one of its earliest versions (but not frequently) and I'd still pull out Gimp as the textbook example of a non-intuitive UI with poor discoverability. It's gotten better, but it took many years for it to add the hint of pressing shift to draw lines, for example.

The point is that a paint application is not something most of us expect to have to spend time learning how to use effectively for the most basic features, because conceptually painting is very simple.

A lot of people expect the simplicity to be the default, and for the complexity to build from that.

A very simple way of making Gimp far more approachable would be to have a "basic" toolbar with a simplified sets of tools and dedicated tools for things like drawing a line, and ask on first startup if you want the basic toolbar or "advanced" toolbars, and tell you how to access additional toolbars.

But there are many other warts as well, such as the Save vs. Export distinction which gives you an error and tells you to use Export if you try to Save with another extension, instead of just bringing up the export options and maybe warning on the first go. 90% of the time when I use Gimp, I have no interest in saving as xcf, and I'd expect that to be the case for a lot of users. Yes, I understand it's worth warning users if they risk losing information, but to then instead telling people effectively "I can see what you're trying to do - it's very obvious, so I'll tell you how to do it instead of doing it" is just annoying.


I've only used Photoshop very rarely but always disliked its UI. On the other hand i used PSP since the Win3.1 days up until PSP7 and then switched to GIMP which i used for 15+ years.

I never really had an issue on doing anything with GIMP, but in terms of UX i vastly prefer PSP7 which IMO is the last good version of PSP. After many years of using GIMP alone, i reinstalled PSP7 on my PC and i immediately felt much better using it than GIMP (even though GIMP is better on a technical level - faster filters, better alpha support, etc).

I still cannot use Photoshop - or Krita for that matter since they copy Photoshop a lot.


I was a GIMP/Inkscape user first. I have access to the full Creative Cloud Suite but I usually reach for GIMP or Inkscape first because (for me) they are simpler.

I think one area where GIMP/Inkscape are far better is in the export options. Photoshop & Illustrator barely give you any options for jpeg compression or PNG output. GIMP's JPEG export lets me control color subsampling, optimization, and more. Photoshop just gives me 0% - 100% quality.


> Photoshop & Illustrator barely give you any options for jpeg compression or PNG output

It may have been in a different submenu, but the Photoshop JPEG/PNG optimizer was the most powerful/configurable that I've ever seen. Down to letting you configure the palette for PNG.

I looked it up, and it's under "Save for web". It doesn't seem to provide direct chroma subsampling control for JPEG, but the PNG tooling is insane.


IrfanView is truly one of the greatest softwares ever. IMHO, it's the VLC for images.

Anything comparable on Linux?


Nomacs. Not quite there, but feels comparably lightweight. https://nomacs.org/



MyPaint is also an Amiga painting app for kids

https://archive.org/details/mypaint-cdtv

There's also a Sega CD version


I'm attempting to switch to many of these. Learning a new interface is a much bigger barrier to entry than the actual feature set.

I've been very impressed with the UI redo in Blender 2.8 I would love to see a similar rethink in a few of these other apps.


Yesterday I tried to apply a soundtrack to a video (cut video, cut audio, join together). Latest blender allowed me to add two sources to the timeline, but stutters and freezes killed my i7-8700, so I was unable to match timecodes or do anything. I could not even find play button to preview any sensible result. Resorted to cli ffmpeg -ss -t, which did it well.

I don’t know blender (nor any adobe video editing sw), but as a power user noob in it I expected at least something.


I've used Photoshop so much that the GIMP interface is unusable. It is close enough that I think I know what to do, and far enough that I am always wrong about what to actually do.


The executive order[1] targets the Government of Venezuela [2] not all Venezuelan companies and individuals. But I guess it's easier to deactivate everyone than try and verify if the account is related to the Government of Venezuela.

[1]https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/... [2] the term ‘‘Government of Venezuela’’ includes the state and Government of Venezuela, any political subdivision, agency, or instrumentality thereof, including the Central Bank of Venezuela and Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PdVSA), any person owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by the foregoing, and any person who has acted or purported to act directly or indirectly for or on behalf of, any of the foregoing, including as a member of the Maduro regime. For the purposes of section 2 of this order, the term ‘‘Government of Venezuela’


There are 2.8m[0] government employees out of a work force of 13m[1].. that's over 20% of the entire work force.

And that's just current active employees. From what you quoted, it includes past employees too.

They also own at least 500 companies that operate in a diverse number of industries[2]. And that wasn't found by disclosure from the government.. it required someone to research each of those companies. The actual count is almost certainly much higher. This is important because Adobe needs to know which of these companies are government owned, and the government does not make it easy to determine that. (I'm also not sure if employees of those are in the count above or not... I think not, except maybe the prominent ones like PDVSA.)

I think the fault here is Venezuela's... the government is so intermingled with the economy it's impossible for any reasonable person to determine where the government's reach ends.

0. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-politics-worker...

1. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-economy/we-all-...

2. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas...


USA total full time employees: 128.5 million. Total USA government employees (federal, state and local) 20~ million.*

I've seen stats from several countries and they varied from 15-40%. So 20% is not only relatively normal, it's on par with the USA's 17-18%.

* https://www.statista.com/statistics/192356/number-of-full-ti... * https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/21955...


Wow, this is quite surprising to me that so much of the population is employed by governments.


This little sideline made me look it up, since I had seen a comparison of only a few countries and it was many years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_se...

Most of the countries on the list I would consider living in are in the 20-30% range.

Most of the low range countries tend to be poor and underdeveloped, with the odd exceptions of Japan and South Korea with 10%.

Also interesting to see some of the countries with the highest quality of life are generally in the 30% range.

The few countries over 40% (Cuba Belarus China Kuwait Russia) aren't ones I'd personally favor for living.


thanks for the link, what about section 1.c

  The  prohibitions  in  subsections  (a)–(b)  of  this  
  section  apply  except  to  the  extent  provided  by  
  statutes,  or  in  regulations,  orders,  directives,  or  
  licenses  that  may  be  issued  pursuant  to  this  
  order,  and  notwithstanding  any  contract  entered  into  
  or  any  license  or  permit  granted  prior  to  the  
  effective date of this order.


> not all Venezuelan companies and individuals.

Er, given the structure of the socialist system in Venezuela, which companies or individuals can a US entity be sure are neither “owned or controlled, directly or indirectly” by the government or any instrumentality or agency thereof, including the central bank or national oil company, nor have ever acted directly or indirectly for or on behalf of any of those things?

What are the expected consequences for a private US firm applying the order too broadly? Too narrowly?


In Venezuela you never know, when a company is owned by the state. In the US, on the other hand, we know that the state is owned by the companies. Much easier this way.


> What are the expected consequences for a private US firm applying the order too broadly? Too narrowly?

Broadly, you lose customers. Narrowly, you’re fighting criminal charges for sanctions evasion.


Right: to make the implication of the (most rhetorical) question more clear: the nature of the situation and the structure of the order and it's consequences very much encourage exactly what Adobe did, even if one might argue it is strictly not required.


And my music library slowly disappears from Apple Music (or Spotify) with every passing beat.

And my chat service (iMessage) won't let me talk with outside people... yes I know SMS still works.

And my photos slowly become fuzzy, surely this is a bug when it happens, right!?

And my backups are in proprietary encryption file systems. Well I changed that by moving off macOS at this point.

What's next, I don't even want to imagine anymore.


Along with the free software movement, I would be here with a movement that allows us to return to self-hosted, native and peer-to-peer services. There seem to be a smattering of them out there but they are disorganized and not united under one banner like FOSS is.


Without building and running your own full-blown PC at home, I think the best option is a consumer NAS. Which are great; I love mine.

But they don't seem to advertise and very few people know it's a really good option (with phone apps to replace the cloud ones, even).


It's possible to run server software on HW that costs $10-$15 + a cost of a SD card ($6 for 32GB). Power bill is negligible and there's no noise.

It's very cheap to run self-hosted these days even on your own HW. 1GB/20GB VMs cost $1-$2 per month.

Really, this should be an age of self-hosted if the cost was ever a limit.


Been wanting to start try nextcloudpi[0] but I need the time to learn and set it up (even if it's an hour of reading). My point is for someone not as willing to learn as me, it's at least harder than signing up for OneDrive, Dropbox, etc.

[0] https://ownyourbits.com/nextcloudpi/


I've been thinking of getting a Nextcloud instance at Hetzner maybe. It's fairly easy, and managed.


It's the software support and maintenance that's hard. Replacement apps and configuration. Especially if you want to do email...


You can't really do e-mail from home anyway, unless you get some tunnel to a fixed IP address that can build trust.

But it's possible to run all kinds of other stuff, if you know how. All kinds of scratch your itch apps, monitoring, backup, small web apps, file sharing, audio server, seedbox, databases, etc. Stuff you'd not find a service for, because it violates copyright when it's not done for personal use, etc.

It's especially useful if there are multiple people in the household.

Most of what you list are or can be one-time costs. And most of it can be automated in a run-a-script, check for errors and forget about it in 1 minute, or deal with some failure in 15minutes.

The main benefit of running your own is that there are almost no ongoing costs. Lot's of the SaaS prices are really overblown, so running your own is appealing there.

And people spend time and stress on dealing with SaaS issues too from time to time, so it's not like you just pay and use without any additional costs.

It just needs a serious consideration.

Also running your own can be fun/fulfilling in its own way, because you now have more control and you're allowed more creativity. For some people that may ba a benefit too.


I picked up a Synology, it has replacement apps for photos (the big one) and others. Super easy, and it'll run docker images.


Aren't consumer NAS expensive?


Less than a cheapish laptop, generally. More depending on storage and CPU/ram.


The "Fediverse" is close, but I think we need to go a step further and build a community of self-hosted, peer-to-peer services. While federation is a great first step, it still requires _someone_ to manage a server of N users...


The problem with pure peer-to-peer, is privacy. While now only one server knows what you do, in a peer-to-peer it changes to almost everyone who are connected.

You can can indeed improve privacy, but it normally means giving up speed (like Tor).

Additionally, there are other issues of p2p as a main solution. For example, phone battery or often being blocked in routers of public spaces etc.

I think that a mix between Fediverse and P2P would be nice.

A power user can choose to be a node, knowing the price. But the common user would use some server/service to access it. But those must be planned such that switching is easy.


Your music library doesn’t disappear - if you bought music from iTunes. The music you bought would/could be on your computer. If you bought it within the last decade, it would be DRM free.


iTunes has had bugs that try to remove duplicates and end up deleting peoples' own remixed material.

Amazon discovered they didn't have the rights to a book in Canada and deleted it off people devices. The book? 1984.

I think the iTunes issues have been fixed, but it's still stupid to not have your own backup independent of stuff accessible by "cloud" services.

I buy everything I can off bandcamp and download it to my machine. I occasionally buy off Amazon music, but I really hate it when that's the only option an artists has and would prefer to buy/rip a physical CD at a show. I keep my music on a 512GB microSD card (crazy these things exist now) and I always keep my own backups of my own content; buy DRM free whenever I can on Gog/Humble over Steam.

I prefer to have things I own, not licenses to software and content that can be revoked at any time.


Amazon’s books contain DRM. iTunes music that you bought within the last decade was DRM free and could be played and backed up anywhere. Apple couldn’t “revoke” DRM free music that you backed up.


not all of Amazons books contain DRM. There's a big movement (mostly authors of Baean Books, afaik) that ask that the books be published DRM-free.


The people who publish books on Amazon have the option of them being DRM-free or not. The books I publish on AMZN are DRM-free.


Anything published by Tor Books as well. (Us sci-fi fans are lucky!)

Generally, if the book I'm looking for is sold DRM-free, I'll buy the ebook for convenience. Otherwise, I'll go look for a used paper copy.


When I last installed itunes on a new computer, not all my past purchases showed up as available for download anymore.

I talked with support and they explained that as I had bought them when I was living in another country I could no longer download them.


And that’s the whole part about downloading the DRM free music you bought and keeping a local backup.


Sure, I do have a local backup. But restoring from backup is inconvenient, and an important part of why I bought on itunes instead of ripping my own cd's was to reduce hassle and make my life more easy.

EDIT: And to restore from backup you have to know you're missing it. They never gave me any errors or warnings. Just a few things were missing. They're basically gaslighting their users.


The knowing it's missing is a great point! I was going crazy because I felt like my music was changing but I couldn't really tell, since I mostly play on shuffle. Took a little while to notice what was going on.


Seems like people didn’t know. Legitimate users didn’t know, while experts did.

More seriously, what prevented an Apple user from uploading it on Torrents? Was it watermarked so Apple would find the culprit?


No watermarking besides the standard AAC tags saying who the owner is.

Steve Jobs argued for DRM free music as a means to interoperability instead of licensing FairPlay way back in 2007 in his “Thoughts on Music” post. He argued that most music was already DRM free and easily copied and only a small percentage of music on most iPods was bought from iTunes.


Funny how it's so easy to forget this when you're the big player now.


Apple was the big player for digital downloads and music players then.


Fair point. I was thinking more around the era of 2004.


Ah yes my music! You mean songs that have been overwritten by whatever match they decide is close enough (in some cases). Or you mean my music, that I've listened two maybe 200 times each. Or do you mean my music, that the artists themselves gave to me.

I don't much care for your argument, even if you're legally correct.

This would be less of an issue if the way people actually acquired music was still by buying the album, but that's not the case in the vast majority of people's experiences.


No, I mean music that you purchased from iTunes and downloaded onto your computer and hopefully backed up.

As opposed to music that is part of a subscription where you explicitly knew was being rented.


I'm sorry, when was the last time you rented something to put into your "library".

The way they sell these subscription services doesn't make it at all clear to the users what they are buying.

P.S. plus think about who this model helps the most. It's surely not the artists themselves, especially if the songs I know and love can't be played anymore. What artist would want their work to become inaccessible to those who love it?


Are you really saying that most users don’t know when they stop paying for Apple Music or Spotify they will lose access to their music?

The iTunes Music Store where you buy music and pay a one time cost has been around since 2003 and has been completely DRM free since 2009.

That’s like saying people don’t know content isn’t on Netflix forever.


No of course we know they would go away if we stop paying, that's not my top issue. I've committed to paying $10/m (hoping prices don't change to much). Of course this isn't perfect, since it's not unimaginable that I'd need to stop paying for music monthly at some point.

What really offends me when music disappears while I'm paying monthly for the service.

TLDR; the entire subscription model is user hostile in most cases, like this one. And I'll argue it's also rather hostile to the artist here too.


Do you also get offended when you pay for any of the subscription video services and content is removed?

If you don’t like music going away, especially with Apple Music, just buy the music you don’t want to lose and add it to your library. It integrates with the subscription service.


I don't like seeing content just disappear from netflix. One of the worst features.

If I rent from the store I know how long I have. If I find something on netflix it could disappear while I'm still trying to get through it. If I save it chances are it won't be there in a few months.


And that’s been true for premium TV like HBO forever where movies would be in heavy rotation for a few months and then not available.


Let me make up a story to help explain.

In a far off land of yesteryear, you live happily and healthfully in a small settlement. Despite not being a farmer yourself you own a rooster who wakes you up in time for work every morning.

After years of being awoken by the same rooster, a salesman comes to you telling you of a fancy device which will wake you up at ANY time you wish, not just when the sun rises. You think, this is great! I'll buy one, and wake up later on the weekends (ironically forgetting you still own a rooster...) Of course you knew how to feed the rooster, but this magic device needs power and breaks sometimes... and the only person around to help is, of course, the same salesman. He goes way out his way for you at first, offering free power, and quick repairs. But as time goes on, and as the masses make use of these alarms, he's unable to keep up the same level of service to you. Well that and he's too busy spending all the coin you've given him.

Finally you find yourself with a dead rooster (oops) and a broken alarm clock, with the only repairman out on vacation, while you're missing work in the mornings. Sadly rooster alarm clocks have fallen out of style, and the thought of owning one sounds as crazy then as it does to us now.


That's a very inaccurate story. Let me correct it.

First of all, you don't buy an alarm clock, you rent one and pay a monthly subscription. The salesman is all happy to elaborate on the benefits of this arrangement - you won't have to worry about batteries and repairs and such. You're a smart farmer, in your head a CEO of a farming corporation, so you buy the "capex vs opex" argument.

Secondly, the alarm clock doesn't break. You pay the fee, and it works. Except they replace it every two weeks with a slightly different one. Prettier, the salesman says. Over time it loses all the ergonomic handles and knobs, and becomes a flat pane of glass. Better UX, the salesman says. Sometimes weird things happen - you have an impression that it never shows 4:20 PM, or that alarms only fire on even numbered minutes. This may have to do with some contractual kerfuffle between the alarm clock provider and their "partners", because apparently time is intellectual property now.

Then one day you notice that the alarm clock has a camera and a microphone. When cornered, the salesman admits it had one from the very earliest model, and defends themselves by asking how else would they know how to make the product better (and no big deal about the 180 advertising partners; all they care about is making sure your day is even better by getting right products to you). Disgusted, you cut the microphone and tape up the camera (and get accused of stealing revenue from "honest companies").

Then one day your alarm clock bricks itself, because your government said or did something wrong in relation to oil prices and the US government decided your country can go to hell - and since your alarm clock is provided by a US company, it gets stuck forever showing 6:66 AM.


Don't forget no longer being able to watch your favourite movies, when the studios decide the service you subscribe to is no longer profitable for them.


If it has DRM, your mistake was thinking of it as a purchase rather than a rental.


[flagged]


I’m glad they called it Apple Music to avoid confusion: iTunes is stuff you own, Apple Music is a rental library.


looks for an app named iTunes...


Your books start disappearing from your ereader?

https://io9.gizmodo.com/amazon-secretly-removes-1984-from-th...


>And my photos slowly become fuzzy, surely this is a bug when it happens, right!?

What are you referring to here? The switch to retina display which makes all the old photos seem fuzzy if displayed at the same "resolution" ?


As unpopular as it is in general-subject tech forums, the solution is data stores that provide decentralization and censorship resistance through distributed consensus enabled by crypto-economics, namely the blockchain.

One day, the provision of every electronic service in the world could be coordinated in a censorship resistant manner on the blockchain. Before that happens, the cryptoasset/blockchain space's software suite needs to be improved, with solutions to problems like stolen and lost private keys, and scalability needs to improve a few orders of magnitude, but seeing all of the development on dApps and smart wallets, and all the work happening to enable layer 1 sharding and to develop layer 2 scalability mechanisms like zk roll-up, I suspect it's inevitable.


I think I agree with you, at least in principle. But there's a lot of ground to cover, and powerful forces who would like to remain in control, and new bad actors looking for new ways to gain control. Nothing's going to be as clean and easy as we'd like it to be :(


>>Nothing's going to be as clean and easy as we'd like it to be :(

Very true. I often gloss over that harsh aspect of reality.


Why do you need consensus at all?


For markets to operate, you need a global consensus on the state of ownership.


I don't think it'll help with anything except perpetuating the artificial scarcity.

The most basic proof of ownership is the fact of having that something, and there being no party claiming that you took it from them. Copying bits is so cheap everyone can get a copy from someone else who volunteered their copy and there's no point in even metering that. There's arguably little sense to have a market for digital data, yet we persist at trying. What you're seeking with blockchain is proof of compliance with a complex and somewhat arbitrary set of regulations.


Bandwidth and storage are both scarce resources and metering them out so producers are compensated is necessary to enable an economically sufficient quantity of both to be produced.

I agree that intellectual property rights might reduce overall efficiency due to the artificial complexity and friction it adds.


I don't understand what point you're trying to make. Half of these aren't even problems?


Move on. It is just a popular rant.


>>We are unable to issue refunds. Executive order 13884, orders the cessation of all activity with the entities including no sales, service, support, refunds, credits, etc.

this is ridiculous.. No refunds? if their cycle starts on 1st of Oct, they have paid for entire month(let alone annual subscriptions) but cant use any and cant get a refund..


Can we put this into perspective? The Venezuelan economy is in shambles, a hyperinflationary crisis that has forced millions out of the country as food is so scarce people are forced to eat zoo animals and pets. The government is illegitimate and destroying aid trucks trying to bring food and medical supplies to their people.

But here we are, complaining that the well-connected wealthy at the top of this mess can't get a refund for their purchase of Adobe Photoshop. Given that Maduro has nationalized nearly all of the major corporations in the nation, you necessarily can't be wealthy enough to own this software without being an open ally.

This action hurts people in that country, but it's supposed to hurt because until they get rid of their self-destructive government things won't begin to get better.


Being unable to get a refund for Photoshop is clearly not the biggest problem in Venezuela right now, but it's still a problem, and it's relevant to OP's link. We are allowed to talk about problems even if they're relatively small.


> But here we are, complaining that the well-connected wealthy at the top of this mess can't get a refund for their purchase of Adobe Photoshop.

I'd be more concerned that, e.g.,non-regime-aligned publishers can't continue using Creative Cloud that they've paid for than that anyone can't get a refund.


It’s still a problem because Adobe stole money from their users and didn’t deliver on their promise.

Sure it’s in the name of Executive order but still leaves a bad taste. It says you can’t trust Adobe.


Are there any non-regime-aligned publishers around in Venezuela? I suspect you start doing that sort of thing and you find yourself facing bigger problems than Adobe Creative Cloud.


Yes the good 'ol "Their lives already suck, let's make it suck more until it stops sucking"


More like ”90% of the people affected by this are the ones with their boots on the necks of their fellow citizens, so how about no Photoshop for them.”


Even if you're correct, how is denying these people Photoshop doing anything and why is Adobe punishing the other 10%? Otherwise I can't imagine how you could frame graphic artists as the true enemy of the people.


Adobe isn't punishing them. This is a US Government order.


As far as I can tell this is a blanket generalization of Venezuelan Adobe account holders. Any student body, civil society NGO or independent media outlet that relies on registered copies of Photoshop, InDesign or Acrobat will be impacted.


The executive order is only against the government and their associates. Adobe has declined to put the effort into identifying which of their Venezuelan customers are covered by the sanctions.


> The executive order is only against the government and their associates

Under the plain text of the order, that's true only for a very expansive definition of “associates”, since it includes anyone who has (past tense, without limitation as to time window) acted, even indirectly, on behalf of the government or any of the identified individuals and entities, or on behalf of any entity that is, even indirectly, owned or controlled by the government or any of the named entities or individuals.


Do note this is a complex issue, redolent with propaganda and outright lies.

https://theintercept.com/2019/03/10/nyts-expose-on-the-lies-...


You’re going to find a lot of assumptions here. Lots of wealthy, upper class Venezuelans who don’t live there but “have family” there with anti-Madurai attitudes.


They should be trying to help Venezuela, not start more fires there.


The US government cares not.


[flagged]


Well, that's how the US Government works in practice, so...


Not traditionally. Executive Orders are essentially out-of-band governmental actions. Normally (the normality that preceded the current administration and even the previous one), Congress would produce bills which sometimes would become laws. Those would be the significant policy changes.

Now there are comparatively few Congressional effects and more Executive Orders.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_federal_...

It's not really true that it's "not traditionally" the way that government works. The first half of the 20th century is the watermark.

Not that I remotely disagree with you in principle, just want to make the point that this isn't some recent development that we can swing back towards normalcy --- it's been this way and there's no going back.


It's the way it works today, and the way it has worked in the last two presidencies as well. Yes, I'd love a big crackdown on EOs (a drum I've been beating since the Bush presidency).


This insanity started much earlier than that. For one extreme example see executive order 6102 [1]. In 1933 FDR passed an executive order that made it a criminal act for Americans to possess any private gold coins, bullion, or certificated ownership. They were required to turn over all their gold to the government in exchange for about $400 per ounce in inflation adjusted prices. Refusing to do so was punishable by up to a $194,000 fine and ten years in prison. And this was topped off by the "gold reserve act" [2] passed the following year which let the government artificially set the price of gold. FDR chose a 75% increase.

Makes modern executive orders look downright tame by comparison, and this is from a president that would go down extremely positively in history.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Reserve_Act


[flagged]


Where is this analysis?


As an indirect response to this, if you'd like to see impartial predictions for the next election - turn to Vegas [1]. People betting have a financial incentive, not a political one - so it tends to be a great way to avoid potential bias. If you're not familiar with betting terminology something like "+110" (current odds on Trump) means if you bet $100, you will win $110 in profit. By contrast something like -450 (Clinton's odds on the morning of the election in 2016) means you need to bet $450 to win $100 in profit.

So the smaller a number, the more likely it is to happen. Factored into this is going to be a bit of juice. Trump's currently on +110 so Vegas is saying the next election is basically a coin flip. For an example of this revealing things that regular polls might not, it's also showing that Biden is a pretty sizable dog to Warren (+550 vs +375).

You can now use these numbers to see how close your predictions come to what the market is suggesting. So for instance let's imagine you think Trump has a 50% chance of winning. What would be your expected value if you bet $100 on this? It's: 0.5 * -$100 + 0.5 * $110 = $5. So you have expected value there of a 5% gain, so you're slightly more optimistic than Vegas - though once you factor in the juice/vig/'tax' it's about even.

Now let's imagine that you think Biden or Warren stand a 60% chance of winning (30% a piece) with 40% for Trump, and so you put $100 on each of them. We can again work out the math. 0.4 * -$200 + 0.3 * $550 + 0.3 * $375 = $197.5. That means that if your expectation is accurate, you would have an expected value of doubling any wager. So you are going pretty far away from what the market thinks, and if you believe this to be objectively accurate - it'd be a terrific wagering opportunity.

[1] - http://www.lasvegassportsbetting.com/2020-US-Presidential-El...


If by "they" you mean the electoral college, then yes. But if you mean "they" as in The People, then no - they voted for Hillary Clinton. I'm not a fan of either, for the record; but even with the voting irregularities which indicate fraud in favor of Trump, > 50% of the popular vote was for Clinton.


I'm against Trump, but you can't move the goalposts after an election. There is no reason to think he would not have had a different strategy had the system been on popular vote instead of using the electoral college


Trump's campaign was finely tuned to win the electoral college, because that was the winning condition. If there was no electoral college, his campaign would've been different, and he might've won either way.


I'd like to see what Adobe's plans are for the profits they receive in not refunding their clients (however small). A donation to a Venezuela emergency appeal would go down well.

Edit: deleted "Can't apologise after you drop a sales nuke" in favour of a more measured comment.


"A donation to a Venezuela emergency appeal would go down well."

Unfamiliar with these things, I read the executive order and was pleasantly surprised to discover that this is actually possible:

---

Sec. 5. Nothing in this order shall prohibit:

(b) transactions related to the provision of articles such as food, clothing, and medicine intended to be used to relieve human suffering.

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/08/07/2019-17...


You can get a refund trough your credit card I guess.


Unless it was done via non american credit card (No Visa nor Mastercard) it’s no can do. They also lose their credit cards.


I wonder if this will be a good opportunity for AliPay to move into Venezuela.


Could they counter by not paying off their credit card balance?


As a Venezuelan this is very scary. Not so much losing Adobe, as we can get around that, but the precedent it sets with other US companies.

Losing Twitter would be devastating, Venezuelans rely on Twitter to get their local news, it has effectively replaced traditional media as those have been taken over by the Government. People rely on networks of freelance journalists and smaller media companies to get what is happening locally. Losing Twitter would boost the Maduro regime.

Also, losing banking access (as it already happened with Transferwise) would plunge people further into poverty. A LOT of people rely on their friends and family abroad sending them money to survive, others work remotely for companies outside the country so they can earn in a foreign currency. A big part of the economy now functions via bank transfers abroad, you can literally buy in almost any shop now with a USD bank transfer. Losing that would wreck what's left of the economy.

Maduro must fall, but this will only empower him.


Do you live in Venezuela?


Not anymore but do visit often. My family is still there, though


Sounds like we’ve found a wealthy Venezuelan. Madurai has the support of the working class, which means he has the support of the country.


Maduro must fall, Maduro must fall, blah blah blah blah https://thegrayzone.com/2019/01/29/the-making-of-juan-guaido...


I can't imagine how many art/film creators just lost their current/future livelihood. This stymies the growth of so many individuals, some of whom may have eventually migrated to the U.S. and applied their extraordinary skills to support its economy.

Pirating looks like the only option, if that is even still possible with all of the features now tied to the cloud.


How many of them can actually buy a license with a national average salary of $17 a month?


This affects ALL of their products. Adobe has a huge suite of free/trial/student tiers as well, which also are rendered unavailable by this decision.


Students will still have access to the software via other means as usual, the real impact would be on cloud services I guess


> Will still have access to the software via other means as usual

Piracy? Surely this doesn't count as a "solution". Just because you can evade a ban doesn't mean that they "still have access" - I mean they do but it's not legal.


Agree is not a "Solution" but it does not has the impact that most people are imagining.

I am just curious, what would be the right way for companies to tackle this, how would they know who is the family of a regime official for example? Most people's comments seem to be aimed at Adobe instead of the complexity that is dealing with this executive order.


> but it's not legal

Not in the U.S., no, but is it illegal in Venezuela? They are under no obligation to recognize U.S. copyright claims. Or any copyright claims, for that matter. And why would they, given that the U.S. is enforcing sanctions against them?


I was wondering this yesterday too - Is it stealing if it's not for sale (so there is no lost revenue)?

My gut reaction is that if Venezuela is apart of any of the international trade laws then it'd still be illegal but there's essentially no way in practice you'd get in trouble for it (Assuming you're a Venezuelan citizen and you aren't like blatantly selling it in the street or something).


It's not "stealing" regardless of whether the software is for sale. Whether it's illegal in Venezuela is a question of local Venezuelan law. If Venezuela is part of a treaty which requires them to enforce copyright laws then they can simply withdraw from that treaty; it's unlikely that they would be benefitting much from it at this point. Or, without withdrawing altogether, they might be able to get an international ruling that voiding U.S. copyright claims within their jurisdiction is a justified response to the U.S. trade sanctions—other countries have succeeded in that approach before. (I forget where but IIRC it had something to do with U.S. restrictions against online gambling, which is a lesser provocation than this general trade embargo.)


Depends how much CC costs in Venezuela - SaaS makes it a lot easier to have big geographic pricing differences.


This is a legitimate question. Even in developing countries that have much higher average income, paviating software is still super prevalent in commercial companies.


They have access to internet (although unreliable most of the times) so they can work online. Freelancing is very widespread among those who have the necessary skills. There are a bunch of spanish forums where this becomes pretty evident. They also open bank accounts in other countries so they can get paid in dollars and not be monitored by the government.

This people is trying to survive.


Many venezuelans work online because of this very issue. So, probably, many.


I think it's fair to say that people living in Venezuela have bigger problems than access to Adobe products.

They live in an extremely socialist country with crippling economic worldwide sanctions, massive inflation (300,000% or something like that). Their own money is worthless and most use US dollars to transact business.


Yeah, tell that to the freelancer who works from Maracaibo and uses US dollars to import the necessary stuff from Colombia, be it medicines or even food.

If I were venezuelan I'd just pirate the software and avoid this nonsense.


Realistically, that's what will happen, and thank God for piracy.


> You’ve charged me, when will I get my refund?

> We are unable to issue refunds. Executive order 13884, orders the cessation of all activity with the entities including no sales, service, support, refunds, credits, etc.


> (c) The prohibitions in subsections (a)–(b) of this section apply [...] notwithstanding any contract entered into or any license or permit granted prior to the effective date of this order.

Page 1 of https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/...

Kinda seems like there's no excuse for going about it this way.


well that's convenient for adobe's bottom line


Sure, today. I think Adobe would have preferred to get their continued monthly revenue from those users in the long run. I don't think they're quoting the law here because it benefits them.


Yeah true. Though they could have made a strict verifying process so that they ensure only non-govermental people can be their customers. However that would also be very expensive to implement.


If they could/wanted to do that, they could also use it to not deactivate non-governmental accounts in the first place.

(I can believe they could have wanted it, but it would take time, and I suppose getting compliant with an executive order of the President is something you want to do as fast as possible.)


Presumably, if they had Venezuelan accounts-receivable, they would no longer be allowed to collect on them, either.


Some days ago a big discussion here in HN was about FCPA preventing American companies overseas. Well, you don't need to be corrupt if your government always do the dirty work for you.


chargeback?


Adobe is presumably using American banks. Those banks are bound by the same(if not more strict) rules that Adobe is, likely Adobes customers are just screwed out of the money unless the US solves this dispute. Hopefully this drives up adoption of other FOSS graphical processing programs like GIMP/Glimpse, Krita, InkScape, etc


If I were a foreign company, stories like this would make me hesitant to do business with American software business. Granted, many of you have pointed out that Adobe's model (Creative Cloud) is a contributing factor to the degree this is harmful, but the driving force here is still American policy.


> American policy

And… which other government has never made a surprising decision?


Except the US government doesn’t massively run on Indian or German software.

I imagine the day Microsoft is dragged into this. Even with the current version or windows/office/exchange server/sharepoint still running “offline”, imagine not getting security updates, no support, no additional support anymore.

In a way this is a threat that always existed, and many govs have tried serveral attempts to get away from MS and other foreign companies, but up until now the threat was hypothetic, and the cost seemed tremendous in comparison. But not anymore I guess.


The difference is other governments can't enforce things like the US can.

The world runs on oil, oil is priced in USD. USD are controlled by the USA. Aside from the USA controlling much of the internet and much of the worlds seas.


Thats a fair rebuttal. I suppose the crux of the matter is the strength of relations between two countries when making the decision to purchase software from a foreign company.


Wow... this is a completely bullshit maneuver by the U.S. gov that will certainly make anyone anywhere outside the U.S hesitant to purchase from Adobe.

Aside from that, the only reason our Gov meddles with Venezuela is they have so much oil. We wouldn't care what their gov did if they paid our US oil corporations a cash tribute for every barrel pumped and sold.

Dragging Adobe into that this way is a frightening precedent that may well come back to bite us all in the ass here in the U.S.


Wow, I bet Venezuela wishes as a country that they did not announce the intention to sell oil in any currency. No one, apparently, is allowed to stop using the US dollar as the reserve currency.

As a reminder: early in George W Bush’s presidency, Venezuela, Iran, and Russia all announced that they would sell oil in any currency and almost immediately they were labeled “axis of evil.”

We in the USA benefit from owning the reserve currency it I am always surprised at how long we have kept this advantage.


GWB's "axis of evil" was Iran, Iraq and North Korea, not the countries you mentioned.


Libya got destroyed when they wanted gold for oil. At least China has established yuan for oil for their trade with Russia.

> I am always surprised at how long we have kept this advantage.

With the amount spent with US Military (more than all the next 9 countries combined), not surprised. Military bases everywhere, wars everywhere etc.


I am confused. Executive Order 13884 concerns only the government of Venezuela & about 150 specific people/companies in Venezuela. Am I misreading this order or did Adobe?

PDF: https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/...


Probably, it is easier and safer for them to ban Venezuela completely, than to determine whether or not one of their customers is one of those 150.

But, they don't want to say that. They want to blame it all on the government.

A lot of companies do this. Claim that their own business decisions about how to implement government regulations were forced by the government, when in truth it is their own commercial decisions around cost of compliance and risk appetite which were determinative, not the government regulation alone.


I mean, what do you expect them to do? If it costs them more to serve a country than business from the country is worth due to regulations, do you expect them to keep serving the country at a loss? Is the regulation somehow not at fault? It's not like Adobe wants to stop taking people's money in exchange for the service.


They could just come out and say something like: "Although the sanctions only strictly speaking apply to the government and 150 individuals/entities, we have determined that the financial cost and legal risk of determining whether a customer is one of the sanctioned entities is commercially unfeasible, therefore we have decided that the only commercially feasible way for us to implement the sanctions is to block the country of Venezuela entirely."

i.e. Do the same thing they are doing now, just be more open and honest about their reasons.


> Although the sanctions only strictly speaking apply to the government and 150 individuals/entities,

They officially apply to anyone who has ever, directly or indirectly, done anything on behalf of the government, or of those identified individuals and entities. So, if they made your presentation, it would be an inaccurate minimization of the plain language of the executive order.


So do the same thing, but in a way that only people who understand business constraints will respond positively to? Sounds like a raw deal.


> Any person owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by the foregoing

Seems like not much of a stretch to consider all citizens controlled by the Gov.


It's not a huge deal if this only blocks people from accessing Adobe Creative Cloud.

But this essentially blocks people who have purchased content from hundreds of other parties. Adobe is the global guardian of most of the DRM-ed ebook ecosystem, controlling everything that's not Amazon or Apple.

What happens if a person has bought hundreds of Adobe DRM-ed ebooks from random bookstores? They can't access _any_ of their legally purchased material? Them reading is now illegal?

This is shitty situation we have cornered ourselves into. The global digital ecosystem put it's entire trust into American companies, and it's slowly reaping what it sowed.

This is a good time as any to link to [Defective by Design](1)

[1] https://www.defectivebydesign.org/


> It's not a huge deal if this only blocks people from accessing Adobe Creative Cloud.

It is a huge deal, as remarked elsewhere in the thread, because given Adobe's near-monopoly on the graphics design market, this essentially kills several industries in the country.


I misspoke, I did not mean that as a whole, I only meant that in terms of the availability of legal and libre alternatives for that market (they may not be as convenient to use or available in a single package, but allow you to create roughly the same things).

For books, you have _no_ legal way of reading those books.

Even books by legendary freedom icons are not available DRM-Free. I encountered multiple times, last time was after spending hours while trying to purchase a certain book by an infamous author. No seller had this book available DRM-Free.

It's insane that knowledge is locked behind whether a single corporation decides you're worthy of reading or not.

* Situation in public libraries is not much better with OverDrive/Adobe being the legal overlords and guardians of the entire global market.


Good example why apps or games "in the cloud" is not a good idea. There is Photoshop portable, plus CS6 suite still works offline.


Yeah, I've worked on several video games that only exist on probably a handful of individual's Wiis (WiiWare) or old iPhones, or maybe in a torrent somewhere now. And yet I worked on a Playstation Portable game that you can still get from eBay for pretty cheap, over a decade after the company shut down.

I'm no longer a big fan of games just being in the cloud, or even the rights not being freed up once the company dissolves.


This is true for photoshop, but for any other piece of software (le’ts say Outlook), just not getting security updates would be a huge deal.

Also I wonder if DRM servers stay available in this case. If not, it could stop any new installs, or stop existing instances from running when the current token is expired.


You could have a perpetual license to content that is hosted in the cloud by one or more providers.


That perpetual license would mean bunk if you're suddenly prohibited from accessing that content (or more specifically: a provider is prohibited from allowing you to access that content) by an Executive Order.


A perpetual license would still activate the software you had received prior to having access prohibited. That is the issue in question. People have loaded software on their machines and they cannot use it. You are bringing up another important aspect of reproduction and the importance of maintaining access to software installers, but that is a different conversation.

This is how Steam works for example.


Not sure if I get what you're saying. How can the consumer have that?


The company sells a license for the use of the software into perpetuity as opposed to selling a subscription which limits the window of time the software may be used. A perpetual license would mean that the company could not legally withdraw your ability to use the software and could be held civilly liable.

Think Steam.


BTW sanctions like this seem to be a good thing for the free software world. As soon as sanctions (even though much more moderate) have been deployed against Russia it has started an extensive campaign to replace commercial software with free alternatives in many places. E.g. many PostgreSQL jobs have emerged as well as some traction in ditching MS Office for LibreOffce. Most of the people still use pirated software there (and, I believe, in Venezuela as well) but as free software matures people are turning to it instead.


I recently had PayPal disable my merchant account because I logged in funny (I was on a trip and something was tripped because of the different login region), and now this news. The world has become way too centralized, we should start favoring the old models (pay for something and use it forever, no phoning home, etc).

Luckily, there are some great alternatives in this particular space (Affinity Photo, DaVinci Resolve, etc), and others (e.g. GOG for games). Hopefully, if we support those monetization models, others will follow suit.

Coincidentally, since I'm not sure I'll be able to ever get my PayPal account back (I can't prove the physical address since the company hasn't been there for a while), does anyone know of a good cryptocurrency payment processor?


It is terrifying the amount of power Adobe have to lock the human population out of their work. I don't understand how companies don't see this as a huge liability to their large volume of assets kept in Adobe formats.


There are quite a few 3rd party apps that can open PSD format files.

I'd be more concerned about other SaaS companies. For example: using Google's GSuite for e-mail and all document storage. Or imagine using Okta / Onelogin for company-wide user management and having all your user accounts disappear. Or a VOIP provider and having none if your phones work.


From a comment on reddit: "los narcos ya no podrán usar photoshop" (now the narcos can't use photoshop).

https://www.reddit.com/r/vzla/comments/den9r5/adobe_cierra_o...


Mind you, the biggest producer and seller of drugs in South America is still the longtime partner (or vassal) of America: Colombia.


I think they may have meant the narcotics police.


They are pretty laughing about the situation, but some of them seem to be not happy with it.


It'll be interesting to see if Adobe is subject to and loses lawsuits outside of the US for this. (And perhaps in the US too, considering Section 1(c) of the order specifically says it doesn't apply to any contract or license that predated the order)

Presumably they have a lot of assets outside of the US which could be taken to recoup losses here.

Adobe is an unethical company that should have had its charter revoked almost a decade ago ago for its participation in the multi-billion dollar unlawful wage fixing scheme. It's hard to feel bad on Adobe's behalf for difficult situation created by the confluence of their user-hostile licensing practices and US foreign policy.


Wage fixing scheme?



There are a lot of design companies running CS4 (the last DVD based software) on El Capitain, the last version of the Mac OS that runs it. Adobe make efforts to render the serial number checks a problem, particularly for CS3, to encourage upgrades to their rental model. The era of students learning on pirated Adobe products and 'growing' into consumers of their products is over though. I really miss the Kai's Power Tools era when Adobe was an interesting and innovative platform company http://kai.sub.blue


The executive order they reference seems to prohibit giving money or stuff to the Venezuelan government or those associated with it.

Where does it prohibit trading with individuals and businesses that aren't affiliated with the government?

If Adobe is just stopping everything as it's hard to know if someone is affiliated with the government, then that seems like a reasonable choice. But then if you're just random individual they're refusing to give you a refund when there's no law stopping them.

If I've understood things correctly, then they're refusing refunds to people who are entitled to them.


Adobe missed a huge opportunity to 'fail safe' and provide their products free to existing customers in Venezuela. They have the IP range... just whitelist them and declare their accounts free.


Their message said they're not providing access to free services either, though I don't know if that's because they _can't_ or because they won't for some reason.


Transferwise has also announced today via email that the will not longer offer their services.

https://i.redd.it/jxqfc4c1z4r31.png


The lesson is not to trust any US or foreign based cloud service .. they can arbitrarily suspend your data and service at whims of politicians.

Host it yourself or with a local service provider in your own country.


All this is going to do is push Venezuelan users to pirate the software, through torrents or other means. This actually would provide some economic benefit to Adobe. At least some of the Venezuelan users that pirate their tools will wind up collaborating with users in countries where Adobe can charge. Ultimately that will result in Adobe making more money than they would if the tools simply ceased to exist entirely in Venezuela.


> We apologize for the inconvenience.

That's all you get after paying hundreds, or thousands, for a 'cloud' service that used to be standalone software.


Of course no one is using paid software in countries like this. Why would they? I saw big render farms in Russia with multimillion dollar turnover that use Adobe products downloaded from torrents. I had a client who had massive rendering needs, and AfterEffects license prohibits renders for other people so i asked them how do they go about licensing, they basically didn't understand my question. After some emails exchange, it boiled down to 'maybe that is a concern for Americans, but we are a Russian company and we're in Russia, so you can be rest assured you won't have a problem if you just offload your client's workload to us'. They were most probably right, while i didn't dare to try. None of their previous clients even asked about that. And you are speaking of Venezuela.

People outside of the Western states don't buy software. They don't need to. And their culture is strongly against it (someone who buys something he could safely steal instead, is seen as a loser in Russia).


Adobe is not a nice company. In my country subscriptions can never last more than a year, after that you get the right to cancel every month. I took me 25 min and speaking to many Indian help-desk engineers in English before I could cancel my account. For me that was not a problem but many dutch people don't even speak English.


I just read the executive order. For a programmer, I think I'm pretty good at reading government-ese, but wow! given the words in the order, I'm not quite sure how that translates into Adobe not being able to offer their cloud.

Can anyone with more experience translate the order?


Part of this is a direct result of the relentless move to annoying "cloud" only apps, but the other part is the "we reserve the right to discontinue your account at any time for any reason" T&Cs that all these apps come with. Especially when in conjunction with patents that cover the novel concept of file formats.

More broadly there's a long term cost inflicted by the US gov on US companies - as time goes by this is going to discourage purchasing US software, especially that backed by cloud services. I mean take any of that software that isn't "cloud" software, but does use remote DRM enforcement - should those "can I use this software" servers also start rejecting connections from Venezuela or what have you?


How does this actually fit with what the order says. It's supposed to affect people working with the regime, not tens of millions of people. Is this Adobe just trying to say "fuck you" to a whole country, or are their lawyers just really confused (or am I?)?


Creative Cloud apps only need to phone home for activation monthly (at least it was that way early last year). Impacted users just need to get a new Adobe ID and purchase a prepaid 1 yr sub to their apps using a Gmail address and VPN (if Adobe is checking IP). Then just get on a VPN once a month to let it phone home and otherwise block internet access for those apps.

Also, it's possible that the activation servers don't even check IP. Companies just don't want to get fined by the govt. There's no incentive for them to go beyond the letter of law in checking. It may be as simple as saying you're somewhere else when signing up.


Similar to how Adobe decided to ban users from Venezuela from using their software, Oracle has now canceled contracts with partners in Venezuela due to Executive Order 13884. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/oracle-cancel...


Yay for cloud computing: no cookie for you today coz we don't like you no more.


Talking about a subscription model, my ideal music streaming subscription would be:

1) Pay a fixed amount per month (like Spotify, Apple Music, et al.).

2) Take your amount of seconds listened and divide accross the artists you listened to (unlike Spotify et al.; they pool all plays across all subscribers).

3) No free tier. Nada.

4) Maybe get special offers on live events and merchandise. The artists will be making their money there; live performances is what brings home the bacon. But at least, unlike Spotify et al., if you listen to only one song the whole month then that artist gets your full $5 and not Justina Biebergrande.

And that's it.


Welp, time to pirate Photoshop


The problem is finding a version that doesn't have malware in it. Or, so I've heard.


A few years ago, when Adobe shut down the licensing servers for CS2 it posted direct links to "officially cracked" versions with serials on its site:

http://web.archive.org/web/20161009002305/https://helpx.adob...

(View source or disable CSS if the scripting is funny, and you'll see the loot.)


The "best" method is to download the actual software through adobe cloud, and then use the dll method - that way you're using a single dll that's more easily verifiable and from a "trustworthy" source, instead the entire application. (You're still crossing your fingers for no viruses of course).

Of course this method won't work if you can't access it in the first place....


I've wondered about this. For the past 10 years, I've worked for various companies that have purchased licenses for me. I was certain there were still torrents out there, even though the actual programs are "rentables". But that whole scene is just a crypto-mining nightmare, I've heard.


On torrent tracker sites the same torrents have often been up for quite a while with user comment so you can get an idea if they are ok or not, I've heard.


There is a pretty well established delivery system for those.


Keep in mind Adobe owns many other companies and brands

How does this affect Magento for example?


Well, if the people don't even get a refund for what they already paid for, I guess that gives them moral right not to respect any intellectual property of Adobe either, just pirate anything they need.


To think that someday Facebook, Google, Apple etc could also just deactivate all accounts from a specific country, leading to people losing access to everything they do on any connected computing device...


Why does CC need to do this, but Office 365 and G Suite don't?


Live by the cloud, die by the cloud


Another good reason to avoid any business with companies vrom the USA as long as politics are done by rolling a dice and then twittering about the result.


So "we're cancelling your account and not giving you a refund for what you've paid for and we're not providing"

Seems pretty immoral if you ask me


This couldn't happen to any/all software vendors/clients using Apple's notarization service and various app store models, surely!?

Heavens to Murgatroyd.


Can anyone weigh in on why they could not just move these subscriptions to a non-US Adobe entity and continue to transact accordingly?


For those that are looking for an alternative, humble bundle have a bundle right now which includes paintshop pro ultimate among other comparable adobe products.

See: https://www.humblebundle.com/software/painter-create-with-co...


My relationship with Adobe went from love to hate when they bought up Macromedia and stopped developing FreeHand in 2003. I'm still using it and won't ever pay for any of their other products. Venezuelans will just have to give up cloud and Adobe can't do much about anything else.


This is a wholly toxic situation for companies anywhere thinking of buying US connected software where the person lives in a country that might at any point become persona non grata in the US and put on some embargo list.

Safe prediction is that in the future no software or technology purchased will have its origin in the US.


I wonder if there are any other companies/services that are in the same boat and have to do this as well.


A better question might be: how many companies actually know about this executive order? It took effect August 5, but Adobe is just now taking action on it. I'm pretty sure the company I work for has both free and paid Venezuelan customers and we (afaik) haven't cut off business with them.


It applies to all of the United States.

"Sec. 3. The prohibitions in section 1 of this order include: (a) the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order; and (b) the receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services from any such person"


What it shows is that it's risky to rely on a "cloud"/subscription service offered by a company from a different jurisdiction. In particular, if the service provider is a US company, it's a red flag. If it's Chinese, it's a red flag too.


Adobe lost me as a customer when they started renting software. I won't run any software on my machine that has a remote kill switch. This is yet another example of why Adobe's business model is bad for consumers and great for Adobe's competitors.


Couldn't Adobe take this to court? I thought executive orders were subject to the same judicial process as legislation. It's seems to me the smart move would be to exhaust legal avenues before shafting legitimate customers.


> Couldn't Adobe take this to court?

Sure, they can take anything to court. The question is can they expect to win, such that their failure to comply would not have massive adverse consequences.

Executive orders imposing sanctions under the same provision of law this order relies on are not uncommon and have been litigated. What novel challenge does Adobe have that makes it worthwhile to fight this one?

> It's seems to me the smart move would be to exhaust legal avenues before shafting legitimate customers.

Not taking immediate action to comply, whether or not they are also challenging the order at the same time, risks criminal prosecution of both the company and the individuals involved.

And when the government seizes their license servers as part of that criminal prosecution, a whole lot more “legitimate customers” are screwed.


This will just teach all Venezuelans that want to use adobe software how to pirate it.


If there is a silver lining in this, it is that it is probably good for open source development. But since I am not a graphics guy, I don't know much about the state of open source image manipulation software.


It seems strange to issue an executive order that would cover ... Photoshop or something.

I could see a given country limiting some specific things but something so broad, I don't know what value that is.


Some zombie bloatware vendors back from the iphone dead kick some poor people who live in a wrongful place to teach them a lesson. Yay. way to go. we are all so much better off for sure.


I wonder if GIMP's servers are seeing an uptick in traffic?


"We are unable to issue refunds. Executive order 13884, orders the cessation of all activity with the entities including no sales, service, support, refunds, credits, etc."

Harsh.


as a member of 3rd rebellious country with an actual questionable human rights / economic policy i.e Zimbabwe. These things frighten me. Also I wonder why other economically powerful zones such as Europe / Asia don't produce quality software to compete with Americans. seems software talent is everywhere. & will likely be affected by the US's quasi political pettiness. hey i'm working as software engineer here in the US .


I wonder if Adobe is prepared for other nations on less than friendly terms with the US to start some probing around the Adobe perimeter.


What makes you think they're not already doing that? It's not like Adobe is flying under anyone's radar.


Because there's now a compelling, specific reason to. I imagine the DPRK started new activity with Sony after hearing about "The Interview".


Deadline is 28th of october. Did they decide to not refund affected users before the deadline or are they just not allowed to?


Now opponents of the regime in Venezuela won't be able to use Adobe tools to create anti government material.

Nice move, United States.


Talk about kicking a dog when it's down - wtf has this to do with helping the Venezuelan people? Unemployment and inflation is sky high so let's make it even worse for everyone by wiping out as many of the companies still surviving as we can. Great policies Donald. Every day you somehow manage to surpass your prior level of cluelessness.


I noticed adobe was spamming reddit with ads today on reddit.

never saw a single ad from them before there


Adobe is complying with an Executive Order. Why are you all picking on Adobe?


so they're forcing people to pirate their software? interesting


It seems it's not their decision, but US government's decision here.


Is Google going to deactivate all Venezuelan accounts? Facebook?


Let this be a lesson in the political implications of relying on cloud/SaaS. Centralised, remote services also represent a centralised, remote single point of control. That has implications not only for data security but also for denial of service on political grounds as Trump has now demonstrated.


I guess Autodesk and then PTC Creo and then maybe Solidworks.


Oh shi.. Does that mean that if the little yellow man decides, Valve could disable off all EU steam accounts? That's pretty insane, coming from "the land of the free" :s


AS if venezuela can't figure out a vpn. sigh


What about Google and other cloud services&


Think of it as Evolution In Action


It's interesting that we spend our outrage at companies that are following the directives of our governments.

I didn't see any outrage when these sanctions were put in place. Certainly not on HN.

If you think about it, we're outsourcing the job of fighting for our rights to these companies. And they mostly only care about profits in our capitalist system.

Should we be putting all these pressures on such biased proxies? Is this the new norm?


All due to unmatched wisdom.


/r/StallmanWasRight


Time to buy Affinity Stock.


buys stock in gimp


On one level I'm absolutely outraged by this, but the thing is it's not Adobe's fault and, to be honest, there's probably not a lot else they can do under the circumstances. The fault lies with the Trump administration and unless and until they change their position nothing will change.


Rightwing conservative capitalist here. This imperialistic US foreign policy is so destructive and so unfair. Sanctions and trade embargoes are an act of war, yet if Iran or Venezuela responds, the US declares it an attack and feels justified to impose even harder sanctions or perhaps to invade.


So Apple hides a Taiwan flag and HN thinks the Software Engineer should have done something, they should rebel and fight against oppression of the Chinese government.

Imagine my surprise here seeing so many people supporting Adobe.


HN isn’t a single person. There’s always a variety of opinions. It’s too easy to find contradictions between two different threads for this to be a helpful critique.

Nor does everyone here feel the need to take strong political stands on a hacker forum. So it’s a tough thing to gauge.


People always hold Apple to a different standard.

An issue where you are able to view contacts on an iPhone without entering the passcode is an unmitigated civilization ender, while no one cares that many Android phones don’t get any security updates for a large part of their typical lifespan.

See also the stories about working conditions in the ‘Apple factories’, which really are Foxconn factories that build hardware for just about any major manufacturer.


One involves breaking U.S. law, one doesn't. Completely different situations considering Adobe/Apple are U.S. based.


Considering almost no one is, and the typical "there is more than one person here" argument.


wow no refunds either? good deal for adobe :(


I've quit Adobe when they moved to the cloud, what a horrible scheme. Now I'm using Inkscape already for years for all my digital graphics work. It's not on par with Illustrator, but still an amazing open source project we should cherish.


Richard Stallman was right.


Specifically (for the benefit of those who've flagged the above comment to death), Stallman and the FSF have opposed the proliferation of DRM and SaaS for this exact reason: because a company can - for any reason - pull the plug on the software for which you've paid.

There are free-as-in-free-speech alternatives to most (if not all) of Adobe's software products. If they're "not good enough", then it's in our best interests to fix that, whether by contributing code to the existing replacements or creating new ones (perhaps forked from the existing ones). In the meantime, even if they're "not good enough", at least they can be used, unlike Adobe's "good enough" tools, so perhaps setting aside those issues in favor of tools that get you most of the way there without the potential to suddenly disappear from you with zero recourse would be prudent?


[flagged]


[flagged]


The country's minimum wage in January was $6.70. A month.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-politics-wage/v...

I don't think it's unreasonable to guess that there aren't too many people paying for Creative Cloud licenses there.


I believe the majority of CC licenses are held by companies in most place regardless, so the minimum wage isn't as important to factor that in. The majority of transactions in day-to-day life in VE at this point is done using USD or bartering, so the local currency isn't quite as important either. Everything is under the table.

A lot of Venezuelans make money by doing freelance jobs, and I know many very skilled web devs that make really good money by doing foreign freelance jobs. These jobs may require CC licenses, so it screws them over.


Yup but lets be hones that does not count for side business (rebuscarse) which is often not declared/measured.


> Take about crippling certain business in Venezuela. All this is going to do is encourage piracy (and potentially malware).

Adobe doesn't really have a choice here. They're doing this to comply with sanctions, not because they have any dog in fighting Maduro.

If Venezuelans pirate Photoshop, then Adobe can go and say "hey, these people are using it without our permission, which means we're still in compliance".


Adobe had a choice, and opted for the one where a single point of failure could cripple an entire nation of users.

"Failure" in this case is legal, not technical (distinction without a difference to users).


> Adobe had a choice

Oh, how so? You think that it pays for them to fight and defy a government order?


Adobe chose to link operation of paid copies to the say-so of a remote server, rather than allow independent operation of paid copies. Had they chosen the latter, the gov't order would have been largely moot; what they chose proved devastating.

Designing a fail-safe system involves acknowledging that you may not know why the system may fail, just that something must be done to mitigate the problem if it does. International sanctions proved to be such an unexpected point of failure.


Their stock quadrupled since doing so, though.

You might be proposing a bigger rebellion against capitalism than just illegally selling to Venezuela :)


Adobe customers also had a choice to purchase an uncrippled alternative.


Precisely. Everybody should vote with their wallets against all this subscription junk. And yet...

For quite a few things, Adobe products are just irreplaceable.


When you vote with your wallet, people with more money get more votes.


You can also vote with your application of skill. Don't build products using crippled software for people with lots of money. They sure as hell aren't going to build it themselves.


When you vote with your wallet the way that I described, the companies that act badly get fewer dollars. If they want to raise their prices more and more until 1 person is paying $1mil/year for their software, and he gets all the votes, that's fine by me.


At some point it's more profitable to put more money in marketing. Large portions of the market operate like this. People are easily swayed.


Lately I keep seeing variations of the argument "I can't switch to x because the would be inconvenient somehow, so I'll just stick with y". Eg, "I can't switch to linux, because some games won't work so I'll just live with telemetry".

Until people learn to face some inconvenience and limitations they'll just keep being abused by these companies. Changing the world requires some personal pain.


This executive order seems to be a passive aggressive way of declaring war against a country that has done nothing against the US directly. That said, I understand that adobe is a US company.

As an Aussie, I look at these international companies as that: international. Should I now start considering all forms of non Aussie software /tech a matter of potential infiltration?

I hope Adobe understand they are now complicit in an international fracas, where there's a lot of innocent people in Venezuela likely feeling an immediate financial crush, simply because the software they were using stopped. They can't work now. No money means they can't feed their kids.

They will blame Adobe for this, and not some executive order.

What about the day when some US order outlaws my country? This is a very sad day for international tech.


As an Aussie, I look at these international companies as that: international. Should I now start considering all forms of non Aussie software /tech a matter of potential infiltration?

Yes! And if they were truly internatonal as you thought they were, it would be even worse, because they would be immune from any legal action. Corporations acting as if they were sovereign powers would be even worse than they are today.

> there's a lot of innocent people in Venezuela likely feeling an immediate financial crush, simply because the software they were using stopped. They can't work now. No money means they can't feed their kids.

That's, unfortunately, the whole point of sanctions. They work by inflicting enough civilian damage to get people to bully their own government into submitting to the will of party issuing the sanction.

> What about the day when some US order outlaws my country? This is a very sad day for international tech.

Most of your SaaSes you depend on will stop working. This is a reminder why SaaS as practiced today is a bad idea.


If the Australian Telecommunications Act were strictly enforced, would that result in banning US companies that refused backdoor access to encrypted systems?


> As an Aussie, I look at these international companies as that: international. Should I now start considering all forms of non Aussie software /tech a matter of potential infiltration?

Considering the converse is already true, why not?


All potential infiltrations are non-Australian software?

What do you mean by "the converse"?


I think by "the converse" GP means that apparently, thanks to recent Australian laws, all Australian software companies are legally required to facilitate government surveillance.


You are in for a rude awakening if you just think in terms of 'international' company regardless of where it is actually from.

'US company' is to the rest of the world becoming a liability in many ways fast.


> What about the day when some US order outlaws my country?

List of the countries under consequential US sanctions attention and their systems of government:

Russia: dictatorship. Cuba: dictatorship. Iran: theocratic dictatorship. Venezuela: dictatorship. North Korea: dictatorship. Syria: dictatorship. Sudan: recently a military junta.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_sanctions

I too hope Australia is never like those countries. The countries that the US targets sanctions on, no coincidence, are always near the bottom of the Democracy Index (and typically very high on corruption rankings).

Short list of liberal democracies that have zero fear of falling under comparable US sanctions today:

Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Ireland, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Iceland, Israel, Slovakia, Czechia, Slovenia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and so on.

The reason why so many powerful, influential, affluent, liberal nations cooperate with the US so frequently on sanctions - and have for much of the post WW2 era - is because they know they are under zero threat from the US sanctioning them and they also know the US has exclusively targeted sanctions at non-democratic, extremely high-corruption nations.

It's really simple in fact, here's the Democracy Index. On average the higher countries rank, the less they ever need to be concerned about US sanctions being directed at them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

Some of the countries near the bottom of that democracy list: Iran, Syria, Sudan, North Korea, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela.


I wonder whether "dictatorship" is actual reason. I see your list:

> Russia: dictatorship. Cuba: dictatorship. Iran: theocratic dictatorship. Venezuela: dictatorship. North Korea: dictatorship. Syria: dictatorship. Sudan: recently a military junta.

I read it as: Russia: enemy ex-superpower, second biggest net oil exporter. Cuba: stole our oil refineries half a century ago, we're still mad about it. Iran: in top 10 of net oil exporters (also, tried to take them over and fucked up). Venezuela: top ten of net oil exporters. North Korea: old enemy, though also universally considered evil. Syria: US wants to force a government change and supports the rebels; there could be an indirect oil-related angle in here.

It may be that I've just been reading too much about energy economics recently and am getting all consipracy-theorist. Even if so, I absolutely don't buy that there's any higher good for any of those sanctions.


You might already have read this, but Daniel Yergin's The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power is a great overview of all the ways lust for oil has messed with so much of recent history. He also wrote follow-up, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World which I have not read but also may be of interest regarding energy economics.


The Syria issue is about a gas pipeline they want to run across their territory.


Good to know. It's actually related, as gas is both another important energy source and plays a part in the more advanced oil production techniques.


Though the OP is mostly correct. You're response is straining reality.

Russia is technically a democracy, but given that Putin controls the press directly, murders opposition members, and thwarts opponents from running in elections, it's a de-facto dictatorship.

Those are all terrible, terrible places frankly we shouldn't trade with them purely on a moral basis - but we would tolerate them if they played nice.

FYI: Cuba did not 'steal oil' this is false. And nobody cares about Iran's Oil power, they care that Iran has a publicly stated objective literally of overthrowing the USA. And Syria has no oil, your points verge on conspiracy theory. The US would love to rid itself of any entanglement in Syria, and frankly Iran if it could.


> Those are all terrible, terrible places frankly we shouldn't trade with them purely on a moral basis - but we would tolerate them if they played nice.

The Saudis are the same and they also didn't play nice.

> FYI: Cuba did not 'steal oil' this is false.

I wrote "oil refineries", and I must be misunderstanding Wikipedia then, when it says:

"on October 19, 1960 (almost two years after the Cuban Revolution had led to the deposition of the Batista regime) the U.S. placed an embargo on exports to Cuba except for food and medicine after Cuba nationalized American-owned Cuban oil refineries without compensation and as a response to Cuba's role in the Cuban missile crisis. On February 7, 1962 the embargo was extended to include almost all exports.[1]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_embargo_against_...

> And nobody cares about Iran's Oil power,

Doubtful, given the amount of oil they have and export.

> they care that Iran has a publicly stated objective literally of overthrowing the USA.

Which is entirely because of the "tried to take them over and fucked up" thing I mentioned.

> And Syria has no oil, your points verge on conspiracy theory.

Of course it has oil, it's even an exporter. But here I thought about the longer-term US involvement over the last decades. They didn't start messing with countries in the region because of terrorists or WMDs.

(I don't claim to be an expert in geopolitics, I'm just saying how the "look at these sanctions, they're all against dictatorships!" claim upthread reads to me, with my mind currently primed on worldwide energy economy.)


Yet, Saudi Arabia is an ally of US and purchases billion dollars of American weapons that kills civilians. You know very well that the sanctions has nothing to do with the democracy index. It is just another tool in the toolbox of the empire to force its hegemony throughout the world.


The Saudis are defending their nation from direct attacks by violent forces just across the border, fully supported and instigated by Iran. Iran recently wiped out 50% of Saudi refining capacity (5% of world output), which is basically shocking.

Now - Saudi Arabia is not keen on human rights in general, and does not play very nice with their weapons, but the clear reality is that they would be happy to stay put at home.

The Saudi Government is not actively trying to destabilise the region or the world, they play nice with the West, and work closely with the US etc. to hunt down terrorists, and of course they have Oil which they sell freely on world markets, with no strategic dealings with others (i.e. China, Russia) - that's why they are an ally. So yes, democracy is obviously not the entire motivation for US sanctions, but it's part of the equation.


No, Saudi Arabia is invading Yemen because their puppet politician, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, lost power in a popular revolution. It's a clear-cut war of aggression - which the Saudis are losing. Among other things, they like to use child soldiers [2] and intentionally caused a famine [3], with over 85k starved children:

>Saudi Arabia was reported to be deliberately targeting means of food production and distribution in Yemen[47] by bombing farms,[48][49] fishing boats,[50] ports,[51] food storages, food factories,[52][53] and other businesses[54] in order to exacerbate famine. These actions led to the UN accusing the Saudi-led coalition of committing war crimes and having a "complete disregard for human life"

>On August 3, 2019, a United Nations report said the US, UK and France may be complicit in committing war crimes in Yemen by selling weapons and providing support to the Saudi-led coalition which is using the starvation of civilians as a tactic of warfare

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houthi_takeover_in_Yemen

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/mar/27/serious-ques...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_in_Yemen_(2016%E2%80%93...


I'm unsure how bombing schools and hospitals defends them from "violent forces"?


It's the same choice you have when deciding whether or not to implement end to end encryption. If you intentionally cripple the security of your system, I don't entirely buy it when you blame the government for serving unjust warrants against your system. You made it so they could do that, and either assumed they wouldn't or thought that was the best option.


Their choice was before the sanctions. If they had chosen "Media + Key" = Adobe software access, instead of "Subscription", people would still have access to those applications.


This is entirely the consequence of them switching to subscription model. Take heed, and realize the same applies to any SaaS you may be using. SaaS may be a profitable business model, but has underappreciated downsides like this.


They could have chosen to sell users the right to use a product in perpetuity, as this whole thread is about


Users have a choice to not use Photoshop, yet it's still the standard. Creative Cloud really isn't an issue for most people, it takes exceptional circumstances for this type of DRM to become a hassle.

I'm not remotely saying I agree with it, but its been transparent enough that their user base hasn't revolted and found something better, so this will be more and more common with software.


> Users have a choice to not use Photoshop

I'm not sure about the rest of CC, but adobe has a near-monopoly with photoshop. I personally use Pixelmator for all my image editing needs, but I am not an image-editing pro... if I was Pixelmator would NOT cut it... my only real choice would be photoshop.

> their user base hasn't revolted and found something better,

If no viable alternatives exist, the choice is not do it or pay whatever they ask. Which is why many cc users feel like hostages.


I am not saying that the Affinity suite of apps is at full feature parity with Adobe, but they are certainly targeting the pro market with their offerings.


I worked in design for almost 15 years before getting into software development. I have a few former colleagues who moved over to Affinity. It's got really good reviews so far. When my copy of CS3 stops activating (probably next pc upgrade), I'll probably buy a copy.

On a personal note, I really wish they would have done a Linux release.


Photopea is a free online clone of photoshop. Doesn't have every feature but has a large majority of them.


Yes. I use Krita.


Their interpretation of the sanctions is wrong.

Individual creators cannot be presumed to be in business with the government. The sanctions only concern people doing business with the government.

Adobe's lawyers are idiots and just screwed over a bunch of people.

Don't buy cloud shit.


> Adobe doesn't really have a choice here. They're doing this to comply with sanctions, not because they have any dog in fighting Maduro.

Adobe had a choice when they chose to stop selling software in favor of cloud services. This is a perfect illustration of why that choice was anti-consumer. It shouldn't be possible to revoke access to software functions that don't fundamentally require remote server support.


What would you say Adobe should do differently in this situation? If nothing then I think the person you are replying is right when they say Adobe doesn't really have a choice here.


Selling actual software licenses again that don't require connecting to a remote server to use? Like the had for over a decade. They could still do point release updates on-line, but the software itself should come with a license key that just works without needing to validate over the Internet.

Even if they didn't want to do that, they could do the Jetbrains perpetual fall-back license model where if you hold a license for version x for a year, you get to keep version x. You still get version y when it comes out, but if you cancel before a certain time, it will fall back to your license for x forever, until you pay your subscription again.


Obviously there are many ways Adobe could have improved their licensing model from the start but the person I was replying implied that there were obvious alternative actions that they could take now. I agree with you but it still seems the case that there "isn't much they could do here".


It would be fascinating if Adobe quietly started selling license keys and offline-friendly software again. They couldn’t sell directly to Venezuela, but software, ah, finds a way.


That's my point. There are no good choices for them now. That doesn't mean they should be excused for the bad choices that led them to this point.


We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21185298.


They don't need to pirate. Adobe has been giving away photoshop 2 for awhile now.


> Adobe doesn't really have a choice here.

The problem is this seriously undermines their business model in most of the world which the US may in the short term decide to levy sanctions against as part of its bullying process. Venezuela and Syria have never harmed the US or threatened us in any way whatsoever, yet find themselves on our "shit list". Turkey may soon be there as well, and they are a member of the EU. Who knows which EU nation may be next.

If you buy US software it's not yours and we can take it from you at any moment.

Who wants that sort of software upon which their data depends?

Not a single person in the world with the least bit of sense.

Adobe should fight this as it undermines their business model.

That they are cowards who choose not to means they get what they deserve.


Uh, Turkey is not a member of the EU..


Turkey is halfway in EU accession process and adopts EU norms as time progresses.


[flagged]


I think it's much more likely to just drive them to piracy.


I see over 20 torrents for "Adobe Acrobat Pro DC 2019.012...".

Maybe some are honeypots, but probably not all.


You don't mean Gimp I hope.

I'd rather use Photoshop 1998 than Gimp.


I'd rather use something that nobody can arbitrarily take from me any time they please.


I've been using GIMP since I was 9 years old mate, I've tried using Photoshop and I find it to be a nightmare, can you even get GMIC on Photoshop? It's all just a matter of what you first used.


I'd rather use gimp than photoshop.

Photoshop, ergg.. what a confusing tool!, who would use a 'cloud service' for your important data.. lol.


Because it actually works.


photopea.com is pretty great and doesn't require you to install anything. Ever since I found it I never used gimp anymore. I'm only use it for light editing though (light touch up, removing background, etc), so I have no idea if it can replace photoshop for professional users.


Yes, I like it but it's probably not powerful enough for professionals.


For desktop SW that will work. What won’t work is google apps and office 365 once the plug is pulled.


how are these 'libre' alternatives?

(libre being typically used to disambiguate free-as-in-beer vs free-as-in-freedom in the english speaking OSS world)


Krita, Inkscape & Libreoffice suite I guess ? Also Texlive for publishing.


What I’m saying is that there are alternatives for some traditional desktop apps. There are few alternatives for the big SaaS productivity apps most users use.


There are alternatives for pretty much anything these days.


No good ones when somebody suddenly pulls the plug on you, because you lose access to all your data and the network - both of which SaaS companies control in order to justify recurring payments.


The people still have some time to get their data, in this case.

Also, people need to realize they don't own data that's not stored on their HW. Cloud is at best a convenience, but I wouldn't trust it to make it so that it's the only place, where my data are stored.

You need to keep control of your data if you want choice in SW.


Nextcloud?


This is truly unconscionable.


Nice reminder to us non-Americans, that we essentially live in digital colonial era, where our livelihoods can be effed up at one strike of signature.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: