It's always ethical to pirate from Adobe.
Or use Monkrus to get pre-cracked versions 😎
Monkrus does some good Adobe stuff, never had any problems with them
Tangentially related... I work IT in a CNC shop. Most engineering prints that we get to make parts to have various specs on them for materials and various finishes. Those specs used to be free years ago, but they've most all been replaced, but not really updated at all. Now everytime they have a revision change, we have to buy the new revision from SAE for like $70 a piece. As shitty as that already is, in recent years, they have DRM locked them to a single user. So while we have 50+ employees with multiple needing to reference these for quality inspection or processing, it's against the ToS to share those specs. We are supposed to buy one for each user which is fucking bogus.
Fuck em. I screen snip each page and make a new PDF, or that one user prints it out and scans it in. The extra kicker is that while that's not allowed, you can buy a paper copy that can be shared for the same cost, you just have to wait for it to be delivered.
Same with ISO docs. Imagine being required by law to follow specs you have to pay to know.
Imagine being required by law to follow specs you have to pay to know.
Relevant case law:
TL;DR: once "annotations" or "model codes" or whatever are incorporated into the actual law, they are no longer eligible for copyright.
That doesn't stop organizations like SAE and ISO from trying to bully and trick you into agreeing to pay them for copies that you obtain directly from them instead of trudging down to the local law library and making copies yourself, however. (And it's even worse when you want convenient electronic copies instead of paper, because then they try to apply EULA bullshit, which I've already debunked in another comment.) IMO it's probably best to get the documents from some third-party source so you never get on the standards org's radar for a shakedown to begin with.
I approve this in spirit, but is this safe from an audit?
All of the audits we have to do, yea. They just care that we making good parts, that our paperwork is filled out correctly, and processes are being followed. Technically, if we didn't have any of the specs but still did the process correctly, they wouldn't care.
As someone that had to deal with adobe for 5 years for an 800 person studio. Fuck Adobe. For the rest of forever.
Hey adobe, how about you stop contacting everyone in our organization using a single non-profit license of a single product and telling them we should all be on a single cloud account so we can pay several times more for the same thing just to get access to sharing services no one wants?
They emailed our entire organization saying their license were expiring which resulted in 100s of calls to our service desk. Fucking hate Adobe.
This a thousand times. Maybe literally. They just won't stop harassing us.
Firefox is getting the ability to edit PDFs. Its not quite ready for prod so I use SumatraPDF
Foxit is great too
If you think Adobe is bad just wait until you have to deal with Autodesk.
I managed to drag my audit out for months by just playing an absolute idiot and telling them all my licenses can be found by logging in at autodesk.com and then giving them excruciatingly detailed instructions on how to get to the administration page.
They're both bad
Ah yes true sysadmin energy in this post
A friend of mine is about to be interested in digital photography and is soon going to commit on a photo finishing suite. She already attended some courses and - of course - the mayority of those had users of and applications from Adobe, usually Lightroom and Co.
I know Adobe is scum (fuck Adobe), she knows Adobe is "bad". I think I could steer her into free and/or open source or one-time-pay software but for this I have to have an alternative that is a viable substitute, especially to Lightroom.
As for alternatives I know of Darktable, Capture One, Affinity Photo and RawTherapee.
Any more recommendations? Or an opinion on these or other products?
Thanks for your help!
Darktable is the closest, but it’s still missing a ton of features that are basic in Lightroom.
Lightroom and Photoshop are unfortunately good products with shitty licensing.
I use and love Affinity. Back on v1 I used RawTherapee to do the initial conversion, then AP for the "photoshop part".. but in v2 the raw conversion in AP is pretty good, so I just use that for my whole workflow.
Capture One fan here. Good software buy they are also pushing towards subscriptions although you still have the option to buy and get support for one year as well. Affinity Photo is similar to Photoshop and had a great price, but has less tutorials out there.
Yeah same. And capture one don't work on Linux too.
I like Darkroom and use it exclusively. Cons are it's slow as beans, even on my decent machine. Pros are it has a ton of features. Another con is no AI tools built in, and it has a steeper learning curve because it doesn't have the automatic adjustment tools Lightroom does. You can get a better result but it takes work.
This is just one reason why 2013 was basically the worst year ever. I'll never forgive or forget what Adobe had done that year. It's just insane.
Ah yes, the beginning of the subscription apocalypse that masked a 50% increase to annual cost behind a "cheaper monthly charge". While I miss my time as a photographer, I'll never miss Adobe.
That was the reason I lost my interest in animation completely.
Have you had a look at the Affinity suite? It certainly can't replace everything, but for many users like me it's not really missing anything for a one time payment.
They have -30% sales sometimes. I actually bought the whole suite at 50% discount some years back, but I don't think they've had another 50% discount for a long time now.
If you're interested in any of the Affinity programs, keep an eye out for sales. I'm guessing the next one will be Black Friday / Cyber Monday.
Fuck Adobe.
If you’re some dude who edits photos for his kids or makes bday cards for their family, there’s literally a dozen or more free image editors that work just fine.
If you’re in the industry, then you’ll quickly see no client will accept or work with an affinity file. Or a gimp file. Or a photomater file.
Adobe is the de facto standard and their monopoly is only getting worse. It also doesn’t help that schools are basically shills for Adobe. So every kid comes out knowing Illustrator and Photoshop and nothing else.
Adobe’s monopoly extends far beyond “software.”
GIMP, Da Vinci Resolve, Blender
Inkscape, krita
Yeah these are way better than gimp
GIMP is painfully behind the times that I only use it out of sympathy for FOSS. I even prefer Photopea despite half the working area wasted on ads and browser UI.
Maybe that'll change one day.
Paint.net I like still!
And if your like me and need Substance you can buy a perpetual licence on Steam
I've been able to steer 2 companies and my own business to adobe alternatives. Fuck, paying rent on software.
Feel free to share, this is a safe space…
Yeah, I really don’t get how — what their thinking is— let’s drive our users crazy because no one will ever leave us
The hell?
[malevolently] Its been going around
Hire more lawyers, obviously.
Not knowing who is on here, this is most certainly NOT a safe space. OP should not share if they think it would be detrimental if that information got out.
Expensive as hell, it insists I use their insecure office add on “PDF Maker” but people around here find it worth $350 a year to be able to merge pdf’s from the context menu so I’m stuck trying to find ways to support it with out compromising the network. I hate the adobe suite
I use pdfsam to merge pdfs. Open source and works fine.
Check out Nitro Pro. We switched around 25k users to it after adobe jacked our licence cost by 30%.
Fuck Adobe.
All I want is Lightroom classic for photo organization and I have to subscribe. Like come on.
Not saying its a 1:1 alternative, but I used darktable a few times to do this and for post processing.
I am definitely not a photographer or graphics expert by any means, but I used it on recommendation of someone who is and was also complaining about Adobe lol.
I really don't know if it lacks anything compared to lightroom, but all the fancy switches and bars and stuff looked pretty cool and too advanced for me to understand,
Still using Photoshop 2003. It does what I need.
GIMP
I literally just wanted to esign a document the other day, and in order to get the functionality I wanted ONE TIME, I had to create an account, give them my credit card info for a free trial, let Acrobat Reader download all the other functionality I didn't need, which took 10 minutes. The program crashed, buttons didn't work, it didn't save the first time.
I fucking hate Adobe.
What's a good PDF editor that does e-signatures that I don't have to pay a long-term subscription for? Foxit is nice, but requires a subscription.
I've been using exactly Foxit for many years just for digital signing, without subscription. Currently on Mac.
Also deployed FoxIt for the past 2 years. Super simple to deploy with Intune and authenticate with 365 credentials.
This is exactly why I have been running the same Adobe software for the last, what, 15 years now? Whatever the last one was before they changed to a subscription model, that's the one I have.
CS6, I think. I'm on the same one, anyway.
Just sail the high seas. Arrr!
Ah, sorry, your required sacrifices have entered the stage where premium quality virgins are now required.
While I often have to use Adobe stuff in my line of work (its unfortunately the industry standard) I made the decision a couple of years back that Adobe software isn't allowed to touch my personal devices. On the Mac, Creative Cloud is essentially malware. I use Affinity to replace photoshop and illustrator, while Apple Photos has been enough for me so far to replace Lightroom.
Fuck'em!
Is it possible to pay for an Adobe sub, and install only the so you want without any background update service?
I wanted to install bridge, and it installed a management app. I find it not to trying at startup, but it still runs an update service regardless.
I don't understand how Adobe gets away with such invasive software.
They have money, and with it comes power. Also, main Adobe users seem to not care about shady bussiness practices because they "need" Adobe's products.
Anyone got a good Illustrator replacement for SVG and vector creation?
Inkscape is pretty great now. Lots of improvement in the last couple of years.
Affinity Designer 2
Yeah I’m super glad I don’t deal with the procurement side of things
Hey chatGPT, what would Blackbeard have to say about Adobe licensing?
Adobe, be drivin' me to madness with their confusin' schemes. Ye need a map just to make sense of it all! They be chargin' a king's ransom for their software, and what do ye get in return? Aye, a license that's as flimsy as a ship's riggin' in a storm.
It's a never-endin' voyage through their terms and conditions, and I can't fathom their logic. It be like navigatin' the high seas with a broken compass. They be restrictin' the use of their software, demandin' we pay a ransom every month, and heaven forbid ye want to use it on multiple devices! They'll make ye walk the plank for that.
And don't get me started on their audits, me heartie. They be sendin' their parrots to check if ye be usin' their software properly, threatenin' to keelhaul ye if they find a single violation. It be daylight robbery, I tell ye!
After their fallout with Pantone, I was done.
I immediately switched to Affinity and haven't looked back. Yes, there is a learning curve and you will have to spend a few hours Googling how to do the same thing but it's easily been able to do the same thing that I was doing before.
The ONLY two features I miss from InDesign is GREP and scripts. Other than that, FUCK ADOBE.
