The most ridiculous and offensive thing about this was I got this pop-up while actually using Premiere, and it wouldn’t let me continue using the app until I agreed. Since I was in a rush and only using the free trial anyway, I just agreed, but promptly cancelled my trial after the project was done. I’m going to cancel all of my other Adobe subscriptions as well, and either start using alternatives, or maybe just pirate them out of spite.
If you're only using Premiere for video editing and not for any After Effects integration, then even the free version of DaVinci Resolve is a great alternative. For a while Resolve's performance and relatively better stability made it a superior choice when Apple first switched to using their own silicon.
I was actually only using Premiere because I needed to work on a project that had been edited in Premiere, otherwise I’d use Avid (which is its own brand of hot garbage but that’s a different story).
Resolve is not bad, but unfortunately it can be a bit overwhelming for a novice editor, and it has some other interesting quirks that can make it a less suitable choice depending on what you’re doing. Still, I would definitely recommend trying it over Premiere at this point.
Ever since I switched to Final Cut Pro and PDFExpert on my Mac and canceled my creative cloud subscription I haven’t looked back. The heaviness of adobes additional apps and trying to push their cloud subscription running on my machine 24/7 just isn’t worth it.
That might be the change but the problem is 4.2 let me quote in full
> Solely for the purposes of operating or improving the Services and Software, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free sublicensable, license, to use, reproduce, publicly display, distribute, modify, create derivative works based on, publicly perform, and translate the Content. For example, we may sublicense our right to the Content to our service providers or to other users to allow the Services and Software to operate as intended, such as enabling you to share photos with others. Separately, section 4.6 (Feedback) below covers any Feedback that you provide to us.
If Adobe says, training an AI on subscriber content would improve Adobe service then IANAL but I think this section gives them the right and then said AI might leak creative content. Further since they can sublicense to say OpenAI, hell knows what happens to it once they do.
That's been that way since June 2018 (although it was section 4.3 then), with only minor changes in wording between then and now.
It was also that way since June 2015 except it just said "the Services" instead of "the Services and Software". It may go even farther back but archive.org only has it back to mid 2015.
My perception is that Adobe stuff is kind of like Oracle. Overweight, expensive, free/open alternatives do just as well in most cases but if you really need to fully exploit the feature set, and really need a big company support agreement, there is no substitute.
Also if you are a creative business, most anyone you would want to hire will know Adobe tools. Very few will be familiar with gimp, inkscape, or command-line utilities.
Twenty years worth of muscle memory and user presets is one hell of a moat even for replaceable software, but for example After Effects, Photoshop and InDesign have no credible alternatives.
FWIW I switched to Affinity from PS after having used PS for 20+ years (since 5.5 I think?). Honestly, it was super easy.
Most of the use I had for PS is now split between: Procreate (drawing, illustration, game assets), Figma/Penpot (wireframes, quick mockups, UI sketches etc...), Affinity (image processing, quick photo edits, batch processing, anything that doesn't fall into the categories mentioned earlier).
I used Sketch (and now increasingly Figma) for drawing rectangularish shapes and mockups, but for creating anything artistic Illustrator’s appeal is in the hundreds of effects you can create in seconds with combinations of advanced rotation/duplication/path-following/distortion/blur.
Have you tried Affinity Designer? I've used Illustrator for 10 (or maybe even 15?) years, for anything from illustration to UX design (before Figma, after Fireworks was sunsetted).
Adobe is a virus. You cannot get rid of it. I have an old payment subscription at them that I cannot cancel even after calling the bank. You can't veen close it from the process list without sacrificing 2 hours.
> Adobe is a virus. You cannot get rid of it [...] You can't veen close it from the process list without sacrificing 2 hours.
Yup. Last time I installed an Adobe app on a Mac it refused to install unless I entered an administrator password (and didn't describe why that was necessary), and then made itself persistent so that the Creative Cloud background process restarted whenever I rebooted the computer. Ended up downloading KnockKnock to figure out how it was persisting itself: https://objective-see.org/products/knockknock.html
Nope, competently-written apps can do everything with only user permissions 99% of the time.
Most of the time when mac installers require an admin password, it's due to a combination of incompetence and malice.
Very frequently I will just unpack installer bundles by hand and drag things where they need to go. No admin password required, and when it is actually required for some functionality, it's usually something really stupid that could have been done differently. E.g. a common one is to install a startup item that boots a background task when you start your computer, but they could just as easily have booted the background task when you launched the app.
As another commenter pointed out, administrator privileges are not required to install the overwhelming majority of apps. The idea that you have to blindly enter your admin password to edit an SVG file or tweak an image is patently absurd to me (my ire is directed at Adobe, not you). Comparable apps like Affinity Designer and Davinci Resolve don't require elevated privileges.
Every Black Magic app I've downloaded was through the Mac App Store, and I was never prompted to enter my password during installation. You do have to authenticate with the App Store itself to approve installation of any app, but that doesn't grant the app any special privileges — that's required for every App Store installation (even on the iPhone). If a company doesn't distribute their software through the Mac App Store, then they should just give me a DMG or a zip file with a .app bundle in it that I can drag into my applications folder. Many apps are distributed this way (VSCode for example).
The thing that annoys me is that banks continue to allow payments even when the card numbers change. I am talking even when the payment method is a card and not bank info.
This happened to me with savethechildren.org before they allowed for easy cancelation. In the past you would have needed to call to cancel.
This is solid as a convenience to the cardholder. When there's fraudulent activity and the card needs to be reissued with a new number, it's not as painful to update all of the subscription services. Most cardholders, most of the time, would prefer the impact to be as minimal as possible when issued a new card number.
This is the price we pay for not supporting open-source alternatives. I love open-source but making a project open-source is a huge endeavor (removing "oh shit" commits, making the project well-structured, etc.) with little gain. Often times, users just nag and complain in the Issues without offering to contribute or opening a PR. And the culture tends to get toxic as soon as the maintainer shows some resistance against some ideas.
And if the maintainer says "aight, I need to pay the bills somehow", everyone gets offended because "that's not open-source" and "how dare you ask us for money". The end result is that companies that pay well attract the best talent, and open-source devs end up being discouraged, with little motivation to improve the software.
Adobe is just one example. I hate them with all my guts, but as long as people are more willing to pay Adobe big chunks of money while hesitating to press the "Buy me a coffee" button of an open-source alternative, I don't see Adobe/etc. change their strategy.
No it is the price we pay for doing business with a publicly listed entity, which in some way must find a way to make more profit than last year. Not break even, not just make profit, it must make more profit. At some point that is directly affecting users.
If you'd like, you can also view that you're being milked for money and IP because there is no alternative you'd like to try.