Because of Adobe’s hatred and abuse of their users, Adobe lost millions of dollars.
Corporate has a strategy to win those customers back, in all such industries, buy out your competition and enter into a shittrust with remaining competitors, agreeing to both maximize revenue rather than compete for favour.
Anti trust has been dead, courts have been captured, customers have no choice, stonk goes back ups.
Amen for the GNU GPL. Changed the world. Gave us an out.
Maybe stonk against megacorps
They did not “lose” any money; they never had it
What they lost is potential customers
Right?
If I had no intention on buying your product, you didn’t lose money.
If I pirate your product, you still didn’t lose any money as I still had no intention on buying your product.
There are probably some people who decided to use GIMP instead of Photoshop, some people who simply pirated Photoshop, and some people who bought Photoshop anyway.
It’s difficult to quantify the degree to which the existence of GIMP caused lost sales for Adobe. I started using GIMP instead of a high-seas Photoshop version, so I still haven’t spent a dime!
The “losing money” argument is the same they use against media piracy.
Oil piracy though, no biggie so long as it’s a big government doing it.
Adobe didn’t lose money. You can’t lose money you never had.
Have you ever heard of the term “Lost Profits”?
Yes and it’s a made up term right next to my Unrealized Lottery Winnings
I put that one right next to ‘Wasn’t good enough’
Weren’t they the band with the lead singer who turned out to be a paedo?
But thwy arent gwtting more money feom you and losing future sales feom new versions. Fuck subs.
What many people don’t think about is that open source / free software is anti-billionaire software.
Since all software is bits, and it’s free and easy to copy bits, to make money from software, a company needs to build a “moat”. A moat is something that protects your company from people choosing alternatives. Open source software is built without a moat, so that anybody and everybody can access it. And, if you build with the GPL anybody who builds something based on your software is forbidden from building a moat of their own.
This means that it’s really hard to get rich building free / open source software. But, it also means that in any area where there is free / open source software it’s much harder for fully commercial, closed source, for profit companies to make big profits. Enshittify too much and people will just switch to the alternative, even if the alternative is significantly less stable, not as easy to use, is lacking features, etc. Piss people off too much and they might actually invest engineering money on improving the open source alternative.
Adobe is a big company with their fingers in many different pies. Photoshop is only one of their products. Gimp alone can’t do much to hold Adobe back, but it does limit what they can do with Photoshop and still expect to make money from it.
Software licensing will eventually be relegated to the “dustbin of history”, hopefully it won’t be after humanity emerges from a post-apocalyptic hellscape.
Yeah. Software licensing is artificial scarcity, trying to make the new world of bits seem like the old world of objects so that people who knew how to make money with objects can still make money with bits.
Are not the copyleft licenses the opposite of artificial scarcity, not just affirming that opposite, but also affirming to not impose that artificial scarcity later on, as a condition?
Even permissive licenses start from an absence of artificial scarcity. Even if though later on, forks can add their artificial scarcity.
Yes, that’s the distinguishing feature of the GPL. The ironic thing is that the only thing that gives the GPL its power is the thing it’s trying to fight. If IP laws didn’t exist, the GPL would be unenforceable, but it would also be unnecessary.
I agree that it’s artificial scarcity, but I don’t think the conversation is going to fully be able to move to removing that scarcity until we find a way to handle the people who rearrange the bits actually living in a world of objects and totally authentic scarcity.
It’s the same dilemma we have with authors and musicians. Even if it can be infinitely copied the people who make it still need to eat, and not just be able to find a way to eat, but to reliably and predictably eat which makes donations and crowd funding iffy at best.
As a user and contributer to open source, I’m loath to put up any defense of something that irritates me more often than not. As a person who makes a living working on the closed side I can honestly say I would probably not be in the field if there wasn’t as much ability to make a living in it.
Software patents can fuck off though.
It will probably take something like universal basic income. Also, before copyright etc. a lot of art was created when a patron paid the artist for their work. In modern times, a single individual patron has been replaced by a bunch of them using Patreon. In addition, some people (not enough) are employed to work on open source software. It’s similar to a patron kind of arrangement because someone is paying for the “artist” to work, even though the thing the artist produces can’t be owned by the employer.
I think if you combine all those various things the need for “intellectual property” goes away. But, the people who currently make money from IP are going to fight tooth and nail to keep it.
apocalyptic hellscape
Which is, sadly, where we are right now
Heading there but plenty of room to get worse
to make money from software, a company needs to build a “moat”.
No. There are other ways.
I’ve paid more for Free Software licensed software voluntarily than I ever did for proprietary software with its moats. Largely because they have no moat.
And has that made the people selling that software rich? No.
My point is that to get rich making software you need a moat. You can still make a bit of money without it, but it will be a fraction of what you can make if you can use intellectual property laws to make sure you don’t have to worry about competitors.
suse, canonical, mozilla, redhat, the linux foundation, all seem rich to me.
Ok, but you’re wrong.
This means that it’s really hard to get rich building free / open source software.
Red Hat, Canonical and others disagree.
Meta is probably the biggest example of profiting from open source
Oh i wasn’t even going into the “rip-off open source without giving anything back” territory, quite a lot of tech companies are guilty of that.
Red Hat doesn’t even exist anymore. They’re nothing more than an IBM subsidiary. Canonical is hardly rich. It may be influential in the free software world, but in terms of market cap, they’re half the size of “A2Z Cust2Mate Solutions Corp”. Have you ever heard of A2Z Cust2Mate Solutions Corp? I hadn’t until I started looking for software companies comparable to Canonical.
If only I was free enough to code the end of software companies.
A few of the replies here, those making those replies, could do with having someone introduce them to the concept of “put up or hack up”, and getting into a Free Software philosophy mindset, and out of a consumer mindset.
GIMP’s free software. Free to use, study, share and change… You the user are empowered. Even if you yourself lack aptitude (beyond just having never tried), you can still seek the services of others, be it those you pay to implement what you want, or, form a community of like minded individuals with similar needs to be met, and from there, start to make it as you want. These days, even LLMs can help curate the software into forms more suited to your needs. … That is, where that’s not already happened, or where there are reconfigurations you were simply not aware of, because it had not occurred to you to search for such, having been conditioned to stay in the box by the consumer mindset the corporation curated in your mind. It’s refreshing to get out of having your mind curated by the corporation, and into using your mind to curate your software.
Either the user controls the software, or the user is controlled by the software and those who control the software.
It’s a different philosophy. Not just a different platform for you as a “consumer”. You’re not a cash-cow for the corporation, with Free Software. You can contribute. Scratch those itches yourself. You may find others share the same itch. Giving back, is a much more rewarding experience than just hoping daddy corporation will give you what you want while you continue to atrophy your abilities.
Put up or hack up. ;)
And giving back comes in all forms. Writing docs, answering questions, helping out new users, fixing bugs, or just spreading the gospel of said FOSS software.
… Y’all should check out Krita.
… Y’all should check out Krita.
MyPaint too.
And others.
Imagemagick’s not to be scoffed at either.
Imagemagick’s not to be scoffed at either.
The ffmpeg of imaging.
I like to point out to folks that pre-google Youtube was built on ffmpeg. You can set up streaming servers on it and all kinds of stuff. So who is stealing from whom… the pattern is theft from open source, not the other way around.
some open source projects have very unpleasant communities around them, GIMP is not one of them. very easy to get into and everyone is extremely helpful and friendly.
I know quite a few professionals that use GIMP and Inkscape just so they arent locked into the adobe ecosystem and monthly/yearly fees.
Jehan Pages, you have bestowed my life with an abundance of badly edited memes and given me a trade that can I be proud of (making badly edited memes in Gimp), thank you.
There’s also Krita if you’re more of an artist
Maybe you mean a more “brush and canvas” interface without complexity and distraction. I’m an artist that uses gimp. They are both great, Krita is just made with ease of use and emulation of irl tools in mind. GIMP can do emulation stuff too, but it can also do tons of other things, even video fx and animation.
GIMP can do […] video fx and animation.
Sounds like feature creep to me tbh.
These features come from maintained modules or scripts that can be added if desired. There is a tiny bit of animation support in plain GIMP, mostly for working with animated gifs.
Legend.
I’m so thankful to people like Pages who work hard on free alternatives.
photogimp allowed me to abandon photoshop entirely, I vastly prefer my new adobe free workflow
I would argue Adobe lost more money from pirated Adobe apps than GIMP
What a bastard. Consider the plight of the multinational corporation. They are ashen faced in the C-suite mumbling lamentations, ‘number go down’ and ‘shareholder value’.
all adobe needed to do was make one time purchase software and not subscription. The CC model is insane
I’m still rolling with the universal binary copy of PSCS3 that I bought in 2007 to use on my PPC G4 mac tower. Dual boot to macOS Mojave 10.14.6 for that sweet 32–bit support. Adobe went to the rental model because of isers such as myself. Old tools that work and do what I need have no reason to be replaced.
Someone asked me yesterday what products besides Adobe’s there were for his elderly cousin to merge PDFs, or extract pages. I proposed a few options, so I’m technically helping to lose money for Adobe. I’m doing my part 😁
Linux comes (at least on Mint and Ubuntu) with the
poppler-utilssuite of tools. you can merge, extract pages, even rip all the images out of a pdf in source quality. very useful.Yeah you get a lot of options on Linux. I used
pdftklast time.Unfortunately the parameters here were, “elderly dude” “needs GUI” and “on Windows” :-(
yes, I hear you. I have dreams of a publicly funded linux distro with accessibility and security (for elderly dudes and the like) the main design focus. My rebuilt federal government would develop this.
