Adobe products are really the only software I advocate pirating. There’s a lot of great software out there and we should pay for it, but some companies have just turned to greed and screwing over customers.
Pirating Adobe tools = training people in their usage. Their job will then pay for Adobe, as they already know it. If you want to hurt Adobe, advocate not pirating them and point users to alternatives
Most people aren't interested in enacting karmic justice when they pirate Adobe software for personal reasons they just want to have access to the best in class software while avoiding the relatively high cost for something that isn't generating their paycheck at the time.
Correct. Piracy results in a market dynamic where even a strong second player can't win from the market leader, and pushes software markets to monopolies.
Companies like MS and Adobe know this. They have to perform regular anti pitacy charades, but they vastly prefer someone pirating -a potential future buy- to someone buying an alternative - an actual lost sale.
Same dynamic in hollywood: Pirating a film is vastly better for them than finding alternative hobbies and not buying the series merchandise.
There are cheaper alternatives, such as Affinity Designer, Sketch, etc, depending on your use case. As others have mentioned, even if you pirate adobe, by using their products you reinforce the influence adobe has.
Now as far as I know, there aren't any -good- film editing alternatives that are free. I have tried a fair few open source alternatives and they are pitiful compared to adobe premiere. So while I can't recommend pirating, if you're a film student... I can understand it. It's how the industry is, sadly.
> there aren't any -good- film editing alternatives that are free
I've only used it for fairly basic work, but DaVinci Resolve[1] seems pretty good. Not open source, but the free version is licenced for commercial use and AFAICT it seems to have a fairly complete feature set. I suspect it would be sufficient for many use cases.
Resolve is fantastic, the only thing absent in the free version that really affects me is the lack of GPU support, but I'd gladly pay if my usage increased to the point where it got in my way.
I'm pretty sure the non-studio version uses the GPU for most things (in fact Resolve doesn't work at all without a GPU supporting one of the three compute APIs), it does not, however, support encoding or decoding on the GPU. This is rather noticeable when working with h.264 source material. "Real pros" wouldn't be bothered much by this, because they'd be using post production / intermediate codecs which are fast to decode, while also not needing to produce h.264 deliverables. "Real pros" might be bothered by the free version only doing Ultra HD and not (DCI) 4K.
Resolve is probably one of the software packages with the most intelligent free / paid feature split out there. The free version is really, really good and has almost no limitations, but professionals will want the paid version to get the last few percent out of it.
There's a little bit of a learning curve to Resolve for casual use, but since Resolve 16 has gotten the "cut" page the learning curve has been flattened quite a lot I'd say. Overall it's fantastic software.
Just the other day, I was talking about the difficulty of monetizing an app I wanted to build with my partner. We agreed that the app had an extremely small target audience - university types for whom the app would provide hundreds of dollars of value a year (paid out of their grants, not their salary). The problem is that absolutely no one pays >= $100 for a phone app.
Adobe was in the same situation years ago. It provided products generating thousands of dollars in value a year for professionals and the corporate world. Photoshop CS6 cost $700, the version of it for "students" $250. This put it well out of the budget range of most ordinary people. Photoshop was built for a relatively small target audience. You might argue that piracy was the normal, expected solution to this. The "real" customers were supposed to pay for it. Either way, this generated a lot of ill will toward Adobe and turned pirating Photoshop into a bit of a meme.
That changed when Adobe realized you could nickle and dime people out of the same amount of money in the long run. The photography subscription (Photoshop + Lightroom) costs $720 over six years. Given that Adobe offered upgrade promotions (e.g. CS5 to CS6) for about half off, it's roughly the same price as it was before. This approach makes it much more palatable to the average consumer (for the same reason that people are willing to buy sofas on payment plans). The only people this pisses off are a handful of hardcore users who expect to "own" all the software they use, but probably not the corporate world which is used to paying subscriptions. It almost certainly makes them far more money through making the software available to those who can't (or won't) pay the one-time price.
> The photography subscription (Photoshop + Lightroom) costs $720 over six years. Given that Adobe offered upgrade promotions (e.g. CS5 to CS6) for about half off, it's roughly the same price as it was before.
Very interesting analysis. I was inclined to doubt it so I checked and you are absolutely right: Adobe does indeed have a Photoshop + Lightroom bundle [0] that costs ~$10/month or $119.88/yr, such that it comes to $720 over a six-year period.
You think nickel and diming people causes less ill will from ordinary people than a high price that nobody expects you to pay?
> The only people this pisses off are a handful of hardcore users who expect to "own" all the software they use
Also the people that want to be able to access their files forever. Not only when people chose to stop paying, Adobe won't even let people pay for some of the old versions of their subscription software. Hope it imports into the new version correctly!
I'm looking at Presonus Sphere, and at $15/month it doesn't seem like nickel-and-diming to me. What it seems like is a chance to make sure some pretty expensive software works for me, and to stay current with everything, for as long as I feel like using it.
