> 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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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]"
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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".