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You can no longer reinstall CS 2 or 3 even if you have the original disks (adobe.com)
578 points by interestica on Oct 23, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 402 comments



There are special no-activation-required versions of the entire CS2 and CS3 product line!

Adobe killed the product activation servers for CS2 products in 2013, and for CS3 products in 2017. For CS2, they offered Activation-free replacement installers and generic serial numbers on their support page. This resulted in a bunch of press[0] about it being a /!\ omg completely free Creative Suite /!\, so for CS3's 2017 shutdown[1] they made you register your original serials to your Adobe Account in exchange for an individualized offline serial and the offline installer[2].

I don't know exactly when, but some time around the end of 2019 or the beginning of 2020 they ended[3] the offline installer program for CS3, removed the ability to generate offline serials in my Adobe Account page or even re-access the offline downloads for my already-generated serials, and have seemingly scrubbed their Knowledge Base of any mention that they ever existed.

I am so thankful I got them while I was able to since aside from needing to tweak the high-DPI handling[4] the CS3 apps work beautifully on my Windows 10 x64 machine. All CS3 applications are only 32-bit, but they're also the final versions with traditional UIs before they gave everything a shiny new Flash-based UI in CS4, so I'm fine with it :)

[0]: https://nofilmschool.com/2013/01/adobe-releases-creative-sui...

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190401002548/https://helpx.ado...

[2]: https://i.imgur.com/ae1SWN5.png (my screenshot!)

[3]: https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop/locked-photoshop-cs...

[4]: https://i.imgur.com/OjBggBb.png


That was an excellent summary of Adobe's software giveaway.

Are you sure that the replacement serial numbers are individualized? When I tried googling, some of my replacement serial numbers are found on the web, some aren't. This seems to suggest that they are not individualized -- at least for some product & platform combinations.

My own theory about the motivation of the original giveaway is that they lost the ability to generate new licenses for those old versions, so they made it free. A comment[1] from 3 years ago:

How could they lose the ability to create licenses? I can think of many scenarios: The one server that ran the legacy license code crashed, and they had no backups. Or they lost the database of who had which product and serial number, so there was no way to verify anything when someone needed to reactivite an old product or move their license to a different system. Or there was a new bug or incompatibility in their license generator, perhaps due to a server upgrade, but the source code for the licensing software was lost so there was no way to rebuild it.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15732354


> But are you sure that the replacement serial numbers are individualized?

Just an assumption because I have two legit OS X CS3 Master Collection serials, got two different replacement offline serials for them, and those serials don't work for the Windows version just like the originals didn't v(._. )v


Well, that could easily still be the case if there was one code for Windows and one for OS X.


At least two for OS X, since GP had two.


I believe for the CS2 versions they released the mac serials were also different from the windows versions, and each product had its own serial.


Oh dear, thank you so very much genuinely for your excellent history. Unfortunately I think this is going to leave me with the loss, since I last backed up my design workstation to tape conveniently the just far enough distant past and (dealing with long-term injury that I am only recently overcome sufficiently for picking up my WACOM pen again) only the last month or so have been planning on restoring.

Completely seriously, isn't Adobe missing out on a significant community of graying designers who would be entirely contented to pay Adobe quintennially for a long term support version with standard menus and hardened fuzzed etc security wash before rtm?

Priced at say 60 percent of the current subscription, and given the opportunity for satisfying this constituency of customers who I am not sure at all would be Adobe customers in the future otherwise, isn't even such a radical branch viable?


I’ve noticed a few companies seemingly pricing things higher than you’d think was sensible (the one that struck me recently is Contentful, who’s pricing tiers quickly jump up to “far too expensive for a small company”)... my assumption is they’ve made a decision that they are better served going after the customers who can pay more and leaving the rest to the competitors.

I guess maybe this is based on projections about whether (in Adobe’s case) those customers unwilling to pay a subscription are likely to ever buy upgrades, maybe also it’s easier to focus on pleasing a smaller number of more “committed” customers? Not sure really, I’d be interested to read more.

But it’s probably a conscious decision on their part, unfortunately, so I doubt we’ll ever see “one off” purchase software from Adobe again.

I do pay for their Photography package (Lightroom, Photoshop and cloud storage) and actually the cloud storage and iOS versions of Lightroom make it worthwhile for me. I occasionally need a vector editor and would probably pay another £5-10/month for Illustrator, but instead I’d have to jump to paying for full CC, so I use Affinity Designer instead!


Affinity Designer is my best purchase this year. I don't need to use my graphics editor every single week or month, and it does not make any sense to pay Adobe on a subscription basis.


Affinity looks like the most promising replacement for Adobe applications like Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.

The Affinity applications get a lot of things right, and do some things better than Adobe already. And obviously the pricing and permanent sale model are much more attractive than Adobe's subscription model.

They do also have some almost unbelievable limitations, where what you'd expect to be entry-level functionality simply doesn't exist, and they lack any sort of plug-in ecosystem and all the extensibility and customisation that brings.

But saying that, it's not as if Adobe's applications haven't had bizarre omissions over the years, and they've had much longer to fix them. Hopefully Serif can keep up the momentum and community good will it's built for the Affinity suite and in time they'll close the gaps.


>They do also have some almost unbelievable limitations, where what you'd expect to be entry-level functionality simply doesn't exist

Are there any specific examples that come to mind? I recently heard about Afinity and am planning to give it a try next time I need a Photoshop or Illustrator replacement.


It's mostly just dumb little things. You can transform elements using exact numerical values in some contexts, but sometimes you just get a drag handle and can't be precise. You can put tables in a document as standalone frames, but you can't include them within your text story so they reflow properly. This is basic stuff for graphics and DTP software respectively, yet Affinity can't do them.

But then again, for a very long time very basic search and replace options were missing in InDesign, so as I said before, it's not as if Adobe's software hasn't had its share of bizarre limitations over the years as well.


Same. But I switched because I felt that Adobe got very abusive with customers that paid for a $2,000 and had the misfortune of having a serial number tied up in a crashed machine that wasn't deactivated. The interrogations and scoldings were ridiculous. The lack of an online deactivation instead of having to call every time was annoying as hell too. For a company like that, the subscription model was a "no deal" because then they'd have zero incentive to improve. I don't miss Adobe at all.


I believe part of this is because Dolby is suing Adobe, saying they mandate certain pricing requirements in the license agreements, and so Adobe has responded by pulling old versions of their software with support for Dolby file formats.

[0] https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6002319/Dolbyvsad...


I think in the latest iteration of Media Encoder it can no longer accept MKV containers.... I'm wondering if it was also tied to some license issue.


Huh, but MKV is Matroska, and it's a free-to-use open standard...


Don't expect a non-free software company to understand the difference between a media container and bitstream codec.


> For CS2, they offered Activation-free replacement installers and generic serial numbers on their support page.

This is the only reasonable way it should be done with old software.

> This resulted in a bunch of press about it being a omg completely free Creative Suite

Just write it in bold - something like "it's not free, you are only eligible if you have purchased a license". Whoever wants to pirate will pirate anyway

> they gave everything a shiny new Flash-based UI in CS

Flash?? Seriously?


We're talking about CS4 here: Flash was basically THE way to build UI back then. I wouldn't be surprised if it was one of the motivating factors for Adobe buying out Macromedia (aside from just quashing potential competition from Macromedia Studio).

Hell, a lot of high-budget video games around the same time used a little thing called Autodesk Scaleform. That's basically Autodesk's reimplementation of Flash Player (Adobe was too short-sighted to pursue this market) which game developers could quite easily license and embed into their games.


The wonderful pseudo-3D HUD on tye Crysis franchise is made with Scaleform. It's deprecated, and AFAIK, CryEngine doesn't use it anymore, but it made the best GUIs back then.


THE way to build a UI that worked and looked consistently across platforms at the time as well. It was a great time! Even now it still takes some work to achieve the same!


Flash?? Seriously?

I'll be damned if I can find a reference, but it's definitely a “non-native” UI, probably using Adobe AIR.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_AIR


Flash is still used in animation and other bits, despite its web presence disappearing


Is there a reliable way to view flash files without a browser then? I'm concerned about loosing the ability to occasionally view some flash (games etc) after Chrome removes Flash support this december. And people (I have quite a number of friends who do) already have to use old Windows systems with Internet Explorer to use the Flash app to apply to the US DV lottery (Chrome just offers to save it instead of running it).


Flash Player works as a standalone app iirc.

https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/


Specifically, you need to get the "projector" from this page: https://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/debug_downloads.ht...


Flash is cool and very good at certain things. I just prefer a more native-feeling UI.


Do you still have those installers, and if so, would you be able to post checksums of them?



Thank you!


Thank you for this timeline. I was trying to figure out what had happened to the CS2/CS3 pages and downloads a bit ago and there was no info!


I seriously think this was the last straw for Adobe and I. I just wanted to install an older version of an app (that I've paid for!) on an older computer. I've literally spent thousands of dollars on software that I can no longer use for no reason other than that they will no longer allow me to.

The worst part seems to be that they've just killed links and information about this - so you have people presuming they can reinstall their own products only to find they cannot -- and their online searches of adobe-run knowledgebases are just dead ends.


I worked there. It was a greasy and miserable place run by people who should have retired long ago. Everything was waterfall development, and there was a yearly slave-rush to their miserable convention show, where only half the stuff really worked. No one really knew what they were doing. It was like a time machine back to 20 years ago. So glad I left.


Thank you for confirming the things I have suspected for a long time.

Maybe it's the path I took in the industry but I had the displeasure of having to automate the installation of Adobe security updates to tens of thousands of Windows boxes a decade ago right through having to (briefly) write software targeting a customer's Adobe Experience Manager product in the last couple of years. There's a long rant bubbling up about AEM, but I'll resist the temptation and just say a suitable 4-letter word, instead.

Their products cost a fortune and for the privilege of forking over your hard-earned money, the company does things like this. I still own a license for one of the older versions of Photoshop post-Activation. I corrected it in a manner that would probably qualify as "cracking it" before ever activating after having run into grief with the product at my day job (at the time). Anymore, if there's a reasonable alternative, that's the kind of stupid I won't spend my money on.


As a long time user of one of their tools (Illustrator, which I have a strong suspicion is not a prestigious team to work on) I have always suspected something like this. Sigh.


I switched to Affinity completely, and I also slowly see some people in the industry change. And for video, DaVinci Resolve. There might be cases were you’re tied to CS, but the bulk of the work can be done in these apps.


I've also switched to Affinity back in March, because of the fact that Creative Cloud was becoming too expensive for me and my crappy 3rd world income.


That’s the big plus, it’s affordable and you own it, no more monthly pay outs.


What about a replacement for Adobe Acrobat Pro on (Windows)?

That is the one app that keeps me having a Creative Cloud subscription. In a business setting I find it essential.


I've been using pdfstudio from Qoppa[1] for a while. It's been a good replacement for AcrobatPro for me.

1. https://www.qoppa.com/pdfstudio/


have you looked at foxitPDF ? this is a comparison table from Foxit's site against Acrobat Pro: https://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf-editor/adobe-acrobat-alter...

(not associated with Foxit in any way shape or form nor a user)


Be careful with Foxit software, though. They have a history of doing some very unsavoury things. Their Wikipedia page has some details for those interested.


Do you have a specific link? Their Wikipedia page is pretty short and I don't see anything notable in there.



Ah, my bad. I was reading the page for the company not the product.


I recently switched from Foxit to PDF-XChange and I'm enjoying it so far https://www.tracker-software.com/product/pdf-xchange-editor


Thanks, first time I'd heard of it. Looks a good match.


another one to look at is Nitro as well (just looked for an alternative based on Silhouette's comment below). here's a link to G2 for comparisons: https://www.g2.com/products/foxit-phantompdf/competitors/alt...


Based on your feature request list, all but the form creation (iirc) is handled well by PDF-XChange by Tracker Software. It's a one time purchase + optional maintenance upgrade model.


The OCR is what keeps me in Acrobat camp, too. And very sadly since this company is outright customer-hostile and the software is absurdly expensive.

I've been trying tesseract but find it lacking -- need a better shape/text/picture region recognition (people are working on it these days), and something which puts it back in tagged PDF form. I also want to try whatever Nuance/OmniSoft is selling these days since I used to be a OmniPage customer before.


I'm in the same boat. I keep a virtual machine with an up-to-date Acrobat Pro license just for the OCR. It's not that the OCR is state-of-the-art any more. It's not as accurate as ABBYY in my experience. But it still generates the most predictable, consistent bounding boxes for text selection out of the alternatives that I've tried.


Not sure how ABBYY FineReader is priced these days, but it was always giving me excellent results.


That, and Adobe Lightroom. I tried to switch and had a mixture of Darktable, RawTherapee, RapidPhotoDownloader and digiKam running. It was unpleasant and years behind Lightroom, unfortunately. Even more unfortunate is that I have a stand-alone license for Lightroom 5, but my camera is too new for it (no support for its RAWs).


Darktable has had a major upgrade recently , and at least on Windows, it’s pretty much on par and its GUI has had a major boost in responsiveness.


Thanks for the feedback, I hadn't thought about replacing Lightroom yet.

I do like Lightroom, but the catalogue speed with 100k+ photos is glacial on my PC. I tried importing 30 years of photos rather than having multiple catalogues, as tagging consistently across all would be useful ("Hey auntie Sally, look at the photos of you aging!").


I use Capture One in Lightroom's place and it really is an excellent tool, its raw processing capabilities are fantastic and the features mean I barely (if ever) have to reach for a more-powerful editor like Affinity.


I'm not sure whether it meets your needs, but in architecture and MEP engineering we use Bluebeam Revu almost exclusively. Personally I find its UI very frustrating, though.


What are your must-have features?


Great question :)

1. Impeccable Word to PDF conversion 2. Combining, rearranging pages and documents 3. Editing: add/edit/delete text, images from PDFs 4. Form creation (not something we use now, but plan to) 5. Protect PDFs (as much as you can)

That is the majority of what I can remember using in the last 12 months. I have occasionally used:

6. Compare files 7. Redact - though usually I edit the PDF and delete the text directly 8. OCR 9. Comment. But I HATE the PDF commenting experience, as does everyone in the team when we try and pass comments around.


Another very happy user of Affinity products here!


There is nothing standing in their way to do the same with their software in a couple of years.


Don’t think they will, Serif has always worked this way, at least not unless they seriously start to threaten Adobe with a bigger market share.

Also I got 8 free updates that other companies would have asked money for. At least 2 big performance updates.


Yeah, but you won't have lost near as much money if they do.


I have officially given up on Adobe after 28 years, too. Even with the new features in Potatochop/Lightroom on image protection. I can't run my old software, or I can't obtain my old software, and CC is just a shitshow of processes permanently running and sucking up battery power.

DaVinci Resolve is amazing. I'm becoming better and better with GIMP. CaptureOne is crappier to use but has much better output. Lightroom iOS works fine for freebie Instagram pics.


> CC is just a shitshow of processes permanently running

I HATE this so much that I have an AutoHotkey shortcut that I run after I'm done using any of the CC programs. It kills everything Adobe. I also have a Windows scheduled task that runs every 15 minutes that deletes any autoruns from Adobe in the registry, deletes any Adobe services, etc., because I found that they obnoxiously fully re-added things whenever I would open CC.


Google Chrome is giving up on Adobe Flash. Says it will be unsupported after Dec 2020.


Even Adobe's own Flash updater is begging you to uninstall it now days.


I see people running OSX Lion to run newer CS versions than CS3 because they can’t be installed on operating systems that have gotten security updates in the last five years.

=\


What version of OSX was Lion? Snow Leopard 10.6 was the last one for the original cheese graters, and I know plenty of people running those and Final Cut 7 systems. It ain't broke, so they ain't fixin'. It's older SD tape based work flows that just ingest content from tape all day long, and then places it on the SAN for others workflows.


Lion is 10.7, one after Snow Leopard.

I’m not sure why you’d run 10.7 instead of either 10.6 or 10.8 (or 10.9) btw. Lion is buggier than the adjacent releases (which are really solid).


Lion was the last version of OSX that I ran. After having my hard drive corrupted twice by it I gave up and put Debian on my macbook.


Lion is the Catalina of its era, right down to all the broken legacy apps (because no Rosetta). Catalina is much worse, mind you.


Mac Pro 1,1 was officially supported to Lion, it can run up to and including El Capitan if you use a patched installer .


The last cheese grater perfectly supports Big Sur, short of wireless drivers.


Just use a pirated copy of the software you own. There are plenty of versions out there that don't require any activation, and for the most part, just work. As long as you own a legal copy, I can't see owning a cracked one as being illegal. Definitely not unethical.


Attorney here! (Not legal advice.)

You are wrong. Software is generally licensed, not sold. The only person who "owns" Photoshop etc. is Adobe. The rest of us get mere licenses that we are subject to the terms of. Violate the terms, and you're subject to civil and potentially criminal penalties.


It would actually be interesting to have this tried in court.


In Sweden it's totally OK to fix a program you own so you can use it, no matter what the license says. This includes disassemly if necessary.


I've been a firm believer that copyrights should expire when the item isn't commercially available anymore. And to keep people from abusing the obvious issues, it needs to be available at a reasonable cost relative to its price when originally released, or the copyright renewal needs to have an exponentially growing fee.

I've also been considering what it means if copyright was to assure something for the public good whether there shouldn't be some kind of enforced escrow of the source. Having the copyright expire on the binaries does nothing if no one hid a copy of the source away in their shoebox.


It's outrageous that copyright protection applies to DRM-encumbered material. Simply outrageous.

Copyright is supposed to be a bargain with the public domain, and DRM explicitly renounces that bargain. This is a great example to point to... but as usual, nobody cares who has any power to change things, and nobody with any power cares.



I don't get that. Say Disney has a Lion King DVD. Why should attempts to stop you pirating it with DRM tech mean they shouldn't have copyright protection?


The argument would be:

Because copyright is temporary, it is a legal protection allows one to exploit a their work. But when the protection expires works should be accessible for the public good.

If the public cannot access a work after copyright expires (because of DRM) then then the company will never contribute to the community-good in return for the protection they receive.

Those US Founding Fathers were all about laws that ensured progress of Science and useful Arts[0]. Or some such.

[0]https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-1/sec...


As ever, this would be a more compelling argument if the state that granted copyright protections also provided meaningful enforcement. Setting copyright up in a way that often makes it prohibitively expensive to enforce through legal means and then objecting when the rights holders attempt to protect their investments through technological measures feels a little hypocritical.


There should be a choice: either the legal system protects your IP (copyright), or you do (DRM).

You shouldn't get the benefits of both approaches, because they are mutually exclusive. Material that is protected with DRM has effectively been stolen from the future public domain. At the very least, key escrow should be required before copyright protection is granted.


This is like arguing that front doors shouldn't have locks because burglary is illegal.

Legal status and practical enforcement are unrelated issues. You seem to be attempting to conflate them because you just don't like the idea of copyright.

But that's a different issue. In fact it's perfectly consistent to enforce copyright through a combination of DRM and legal challenges.

Legally copyright is the default. Nothing is in the public domain unless it's explicitly handed over to the public domain.

So software items with DRM can't be "stolen from the future public domain" because the DRM is part of the product or item. And it's up to the rights holder to decide whether or not they want to free it. This is a deliberate choice on their part. (It's a little more complex with other content because the content is assumed to have an existence independent of its realisation or distribution model. Not so much with software.)

None of this justifies Adobe's actions, and a class action against Adobe would also be reasonable. (Realistically not likely to succeed - but hardly baseless.)

But it would be an argument about real/assumed/implied breach of contract with buyers/license users, and not over copyright terms or DRM.


In 100 years from now, you will have software that is nominally in the public domain, but cannot legally be used, because all practically available copies will have DRM on it. The prohibitions of the DMCA's anticircumvention provisions do not merely prohibit you from breaking DRM on a copyrighted work. If that was the case, then this wouldn't be a problem: once the work falls into the public domain the DRM wrapping would have no legal force. However, the DMCA also prohibits making or distributing tools capable of breaking DRM. That means that as long as there's even a single copyrighted work protected by some DRM scheme, then you can't break DRM on otherwise uncopyrighted works.

This is sort of like living in a world where burgling old homes is perfectly legal, but lockpicks are also illegal, and so people who always locked their homes have basically opted out of the intent of the law.


I doubt anyone really believes that today's DRM will be any impediment to copying software 100 years from now. The problem is that DRM by its nature doesn't distinguish between uses that should be prevented by law anyway and legal uses that are only disrupted by the technology. If those anti-circumvention provisions you mentioned were abolished, that would be much less of a problem in practice.

That still leaves all the other questions about the duration of copyright protections, what fair use or the equivalent concepts should mean in an era of technological protections, and whether it's healthy for society to encourage perpetual rental models for creative work rather than permanent rights to access any given material, but these are separate (and potentially complicated) debates to be had.


It's more like saying that the police shouldn't protect your house if you didn't pay your property tax bill.

The only legal basis for copyright existing in the US is to provide incentives for creators to enrich the public domain. Any other basis is unconstitutional.

With DRM, creators are failing to live up to their end of the bargain.


There should be a choice: either the legal system protects your IP (copyright), or you do (DRM).

I don't necessarily agree with that premise, but even if we accept it for the sake of argument, I don't think the legal system does effectively protect your IP in many copyright situations, so what happens then?

As an analogy, if you told every store that to prosecute the theft of a bar of chocolate they'd have to employ specialist teams to track down the individuals and then spend a thousand bucks on legal fees to bring a private prosecution, and at the end they might only get back the cost of the chocolate bar and a bit of token compensation, do you really think thieves would be deterred effectively and the store properly protected in its legal rights?

And yet we usually define copyright as a civil matter in most countries, other than sometimes in cases of large-scale commercial infringement, rather than a criminal matter like theft. Stores might or might not employ a dedicated security guard, but if the guard does see a theft, the rest of what happens after the police are called is mostly going to be handled and paid for by the state. It makes a viable deterrent against large numbers of small-scale offences. Such a deterrent doesn't usually exist in the case of copyright infringement.


It's only "intellectual property" until it's time to pay property taxes.


You are confusing property with land (not that I blame you; our language makes it confusing). Property is a term of legal art term that relates to the right to possession and control over something. There are many types of property, and land is just one of them. Artistic and creative works are another.


I'm well aware that there are many types of property. And property taxes don't apply only to land. But copyright and patents, at least, are more similar to real estate than any other kind.


> The aging activation servers for those apps had to be retired.

Oh come on. Surely a company with the resources of Adobe can figure out a way to keep an activation server running. In fact I'll bet you could find one competent sysadmin to keep it running indefinitely. I hate when companies spew out obvious utter B.S. like this.


CS3 was in 2007. It's not like we're talking about an IBM 709 here. It's probably a Core 2 Duo or a Clovertown Xeon. Give me a break.

When producing digital goods you never want to be in a position where honest people who want to pay you money will get a better customer experience by going through thepiratebay.


The hardware doesn’t really matter, does it? You clone the setup into a VM and stash it away somewhere on your massive corporate cloud and. I’m sure a very small machine could handle the minuscule amounts of activation traffic for the legacy versions.


But that's almost always the case with these companies. The fundamental problem with DRM is that it inconveniences paying customers: pirates get a better product after solving a fun puzzle game, and the rest of us get shafted.


A lot of game studios release a final patch removing DRM. That would have been nice.


Even if Adobe were that generous, I'd argue the situation is different. All Adobe product releases are just evolutions of the same fundamental products, meaning making a previous version free diminishes the value of the newest version. For game developers, removing DRM can drive sales for the sequel since most games have a story and players want to see what happens next.


Removing DRM does not make it free. It simply means that customers will have fewer concerns about the product ceasing to function in the future.

I also doubt that piracy of older versions would affect sales. The pricing means it is pretty much only accessible to enthusiasts and professionals, who would be inclined to use more recent versions anyhow.


Knowing that they will stop working in a couple of years also devalues them. Seriously, a patch to remove DRM for those who are unable or unwilling to upgrade.

A company that can be trusted to deliver that patch will have a more valuable product because customers know they will not lose access to it.


Yeah that's a fair point in the other direction. But I guess to some extent when you have a de-facto monopoly on a market it doesn't matter what you do to your customers, most of them will buy your new subscription model anyway out of necessity.


That's probably why there are suddenly a lot of Photoshop competitors. A monopolist abusing their market creates an incentive for competition. Of course some monopolised markets can be very hard to impossible to enter for competitors, but that's apparently not the case here.


But that wouldn't achieve the ultimate goal though. How else will you get the few leftover customers that has resisted switching to a subscription based model to switch ?

Adobe is business, and it's all about revenue. "Dead" products don't make any money, so there's no business case in keeping them around.


That would be nice but these are completely different types of people.


What would you think it would cost per year? What $ amount?

What would be the break down?

Legacy software, security and the constant upgrades, a manager, HR, customer support. Training your all your call centres to know about it and who to re-direct issues to.


* Legacy software - unsupported, $0

* security and the constant upgrades - unsupported, $0

* a manager - unsupported, $0

* HR - unsupported, $0

* customer support - unsupported, $0

* Training your all your call centres to know about it and who to re-direct issues to - unsupported, $0

all non-issues. Adobe is intentionally breaking the software.

Those arguments are like saying an Apple ][ shouldn't be able to run "The Print Shop" anymore because someone might haul their IIe and an ImageWriter into the Genius Bar.

People know it's unsupported but they still want to use it for whatever reason.

It has zilch to do with the reasons you listed. Adobe is making being a legitimate customer needlessly difficult by hustling their customers to pay for the software again. They will learn the same lesson the RIAA and the MPAA did.


What lesson? With the consildation of youtube and twitter and them now being the arbiters (with a nice backdoor to rights holders) they won.


Early on (15-25 years ago) they didn't really have streaming or digitally deliverable product (pre itunes) and instead hauled people off to court for consuming music in any way that wasn't a pile of $20 plastic discs bought at the local megamall.

Instead of reasonable digital streaming solutions groups like the MPAA made things like the DIVX format which were disposable discs that expired. The commercial DVDs had long unskippable copyright warnings and unskippable ads, an inability to play the content on linux or other open source players, etc.

Then there was the DeCSS fiasco; there was a master encryption key that they called their private IP and used legislation called the DMCA to enforce it. 2600 magazine, a monthly alternative culture computing magazine, published the key and were sued by universal studios, paramount pictures, metro-goldwyn-mayer, tristar pictures, columbia pictures, time warner entertainment company, disney enterprises, and twentieth century fox, for printing a number (https://www.theregister.com/2002/07/04/2600_withdraws_suprem...)

These organizations eventually learned the lessons and won, so you are correct. but it was years of bogus outlandish lawsuits (suing old ladies for millions, sometimes because neighbors used their unprotected WiFi - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_group_efforts_against_...), technology fiascoes and incredulous legislation that made them the laughing stock of the world before they got their act together.

There was a time in the mid 2000s when ignoring copyright was the sensible and reasonable moral action given the outrageous "sue everybody without regrets" strategy of the RIAA.

Lessons

1. Offer products to your customers in ways they want to consume them.

2. Don't criminalize your customers for your lack of doing #1


> What would you think it would cost per year?

The real cost is the people who don't go and subscribe to Adobe CC because they still have a totally functional release of CS3. Once their old machines die, they'll be forced to become a renter.


> Once their old machines die, they'll be forced to become a renter.

Or they'll look into alternatives, for which there are many available avenues.


How complicated would the software be. They can probably write it as 1 function and throw it into a serverless instance...


That's not a $ amount.

How much would you tell your manager?

Someone hacks your server and gets into Adobe with ransomware because it's not managed properly, next week you'd be complaining about how stupid Adobe is.

Are you storing client names on this server?

Can it be DDOSed?

It will have to pass audits.


Pennies


In the last month I've returned two pieces of Adobe software and canceled a yearly subscription. I've been seeing ads for the AI features in photoshop all over twitter this week. It's pretty clear what their business strategy is -- just keep working on the tech and assume people will buy their software because it's the only one with the hot tech thing. It's ironic that for a company that caters to designers, artists and product folks, all their products have such poor UI. And there's no incentive for Adobe to care.

The difference between Adobe and Procreate is night and day. It's so clear that Procreate folks use their app themselves and take pleasure in it. I've switched all my work to Procreate, Affinity, and Final Cut.


Speaking of UI, I’ve been using Photoshop since 1999 and it’s remarkable how little the UI has changed. Sure there are new panels and features, but the basic layout and most of the keyboard shortcuts are all the same. The consistency and familiarity is really nice but I’m sure they’ve sacrificed a ton of UX potential to keep old farts like me.


Changing the UI would raise so much uproar. Millions of workflows would have to change.

In addition, it just does so much that changing it would be a very costly task likely to break a lot of things and end up removing features that some tiny niche still uses.


That's it.

I didn't even really use Photoshop in a professional capacity, but it's probably worse in that situation. In the past, if you wanted to do something "cool looking" on the web, you'd describe to Google something you saw and invariably land on some Photoshop tutorial. It doesn't translate to other things easily. So to switch to something like GIMP, you have to not only learn the interface, but learn how to translate all of the useful help "in the wild" from Photoshop to GIMP.

I remember when I sat down to try to learn paths and such in Photoshop, thinking, "Is this really the best they could come up with?" But, yeah, it was ... when they came up with it and everyone learned how to use it. A switch would eliminate the moat that the product has.

And that's what's been chipped away at, in general. I haven't had any need of Photoshop for web dev work in a long time. My image processing needs rarely go beyond the command-line, these days, because many other things we relied on PS for are described in css or are vectors rather than image files.


That's kind of the problem Photoshop has been painted into. As things were added they were kind of shoved into the spots in the UI that existed early on.

Old-timers have muscle memory, but it's hard for newcomers to hunt for things because it's not logically organized. The steep learning curve is there for newcomers, but since it's what everyone uses they learn it.

Throw enough other hurdles like subscriptions and people will start to switch. It will be hard to dig themselves back out because changing their UI alienates old-timers.


As someone who is trying to use pixelmator after 25 years of photoshop there is a lot of muscle memory to overcome.


> It's ironic that for a company that caters to designers, artists and product folks, all their products have such poor UI.

That's not really who they're catering to anymore, though. Not primarily, anyway. If you pay attention to the way Adobe communicates in recent years, it's all about the "democratization" of design tools. They want their new tech to look like magic to regular consumers. It doesn't need good UI. It doesn't need to help professionals work more efficiently. It just needs to help Joe Everyman use content-aware fill to remove the unwanted thing from his next Instagram upload. If they can do something in that vein once a month and keep the subscription rolling, then they're golden.


Do you feel like they are succeeding at that? I've been using Adobe products since the early 2000s. I recently bought Premiere Elements and it was my first time doing any sort of video editing. I found it awful to use. I've switched to Final Cut and it's a ton better. iMovie was better too.


> Do you feel like they are succeeding at that?

Their record-breaking profits for the last few years in a row tell me 'yes'.


As someone who has used both quite a bit, IMO Procreate is nice, and very good for certain things, but not even close to Photoshop.

If I can't run it on a desktop computer, big fat meh.


Affinity is the answer.

"I've switched all my work to Procreate, Affinity, and Final Cut."


> If I can't run it on a desktop computer, big fat meh.

This is where Apple Silicon and the convergence of macOS and iPadOS sounds useful. Still not convinced it makes up for the losses though.


Another Affinity vote here. Basically everything I did in PS, can do in Photo. It’s ridiculously good for a version 1. Also they made 8 updates without paying anything extra.


Are there any great alternatives to Flash (Animate) that can output SVG animation? I think that's the last piece for me.


Enve looks interesting, it may be one to crowdfund -

https://maurycyliebner.github.io/ https://twitter.com/enve2d


This definitely has potential. Thanks for the tip. Continued development may be stalled (patreon currently paused) but hopefully it's just temporary. Would definitely be something I'd want to help crowdfund.


what alternative is there for After Effects?


I'm sure I've read an old Joel on Software post somewhere about how Adobe/Photoshop got big in the first place, but I can't seem to find it anymore.

The story as I remember it went like this: X had a practical monopoly on professional image editing and printing, everything else was for amateurs. (Was that Quark? not sure). Then X did something that pissed off a lot of their users, and within a few months everyone had pivoted to the newcomer, Adobe.

The moral here is that if you've got a monopoly or at least a comfortable majority in an area of software, you shouldn't just be worried about someone else making a better product - switching is effort and people don't like that - you should be very worried about doing something that annoys your existing customers enough that staying but adapting to the new UI / pricing model / etc. is perceived to be as much effort as switching.

(Whoever authorised the new UI for firefox on Android might want to think about this too.)

What I can find is Strategy Letter III, saying that in this situation the best thing for a challenger to do is make sure their product is "backwards" compatible: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/06/03/strategy-letter-ii... Example: How Excel (that Joel was working on at the time) grabbed the market from Lotus 1-2-3.

When people like @prox below say things such as "I switched to Affinity completely, and I also slowly see some people in the industry change.", I'm starting to think that Adobe might be ready for its Lotus 1-2-3 moment. Not letting people install their old Adobe software they've paid for is the best incentive to try out something new that I could think of.


Quark Express was B-I-G in DTP, IIRC it needed a hardware dongle to run. Adobe PageMaker was their DTP alternative.

Adobe's big break was the Apple LaserWriter printer supporting postscript (the page description language).


> Whoever authorised the new UI for firefox on Android might want to think about this too.

The new ui on android isn't bad. I actually like it. But I can see how changing from the original normal can make people angry.


I don't mind the UI itself, per-se. However demoting bookmarks to such an inconventient level boggles my mind. Instead we have "collections" which are basically... bookmark folders? Except they don't sync to desktop like bookmarks. Just let me load up my bookmarks list on the start page like before and I have very few issues with the new Android FF.

The limited selection of addons is also frustrating.


This isn't going to piss off current customers though, it's going to piss off customers from fifteen years ago, who haven't upgraded, or maybe the freeloaders that used CS2 lately.

A lot of people were pissed off about Adobe stopping perpetual licenses, but that didn't hurt their bottom line. In fact, they increased revenue because a subscription is a low upfront cost.

Most of the people complaining about this are non-customers whose strong-held beliefs on how to license software have been offended. These people don't matter to Adobe's business.


Subscription revenue is also in and of itself valuable purely due to the fact that it's automatic. In fact, Adobe actually reduced the cost of their software significantly when they moved away from perpetual licensing. That's because it's far healthier for a business to get $50/mo out of you rather than thousands once in a blue moon.

The cost of CS6 Master Collection was around $2,500 or so; whereas a CC All Apps subscription is $53/mo. The thing is, though, that Adobe frequently updated their software to newer versions that had significant backwards compatibility problems. That $2,500 would only get you about a year or two of "the latest version", upon which you'd have to spend another $900 for an upgrade.

So Adobe went from a pricing model of effectively $2,500 + $450-900/yr, to one of $53/mo. Your first "year" of Adobe CSwhatever cost you $208/mo, followed by upgrades which were effectively $37-75/mo depending on how quickly Adobe released their software. Creative Cloud was and still is a bargain if you need Adobe's software.

Sure, you could have just stuck with CS2 or 3, and amortized your software cost over multiple years. However, by doing that, you wouldn't be able to practically collaborate with anyone else in the industry. The moment someone you work with updates from CS3 to CS4, all their files are going to start throwing weird errors and not working when you load them up in your older version. And remember: Adobe Creative Suite was THE standard in a lot of industries, it wasn't like you could just insist everyone remembered to click the save-as-old-version option (if that was even available). Not upgrading was a business disadvantage.


No one would still be using CS 2 or 3 if Adobe had reasonable prices on new products. I bought Adobe products since the mid 1990s, but I recently switched to Affinity Photo and Designer because Adobe priced me out. Elements wasn't powerful enough for me. I was surprised how good Affinity software is. It does everything I need and is a very reasonable price without a subscription. I may never buy another Adobe product. Adobe is so foolish for giving their competitors an opening. They are giving away their business.


The old non-Flash Photoshop CS3 UI is really nice and familiar to me, so I still willingly use it almost every day. My needs definitely aren't Pro Tier, but it's great for cleaning up my scans: https://i.imgur.com/WWXiUFI.png


$600 a year isn't particularly expensive (that's for Creative Cloud).

Roughly $0.30 an hour vs whatever wage is being paid to click the buttons.

It's not cheap, but it's not something businesses are going to balk at either. They are showing healthy growth in revenue:

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ADBE/financials?p=ADBE

So apparently lots of their users are not concerned about their change to the pricing model and increased cost of use?


It's cheap for professional use, but it's very expensive for amateurs and occasional users.

I was using Lightroom to manage my catalogue of photos. I'd open up Photoshop and Lightroom maybe a dozen times a year. It was nice to have them available but they were effectively costing me $20 each use. When Adobe products were an upfront payment I could choose to buy a product and keep it through multiple release cycles, which would reduce my cost.

Adobe have switched their revenue driver from improving the product and introducing new must-have features to making churn painful. In fact when I tried to cancel my ~4 year old subscription they decided charged me a penalty fee because it wasn't done immediately before my account's anniversary. Their incentives are now strongly misaligned with building a good customer experience.


That's me.

I bought Lightroom 3 times (1/3/5?) and used it a bunch, but not professionally. I've got tons of old images in it, from that era, I open it a couple of times a year to find stuff. I've moved on, I don't do DSLR/RAW images anymore.

This version doesn't run on Catalina, and the only upgrade that would keep the develop settings is O(10)/mo. So I'm looking for something that can do the cataloging, and something that can do the processing should I ever do that again.

I have 0 hope that anything will take the develop settings in lightroom and use/improve them, but that would be perfect. (I've got one image in particular that's just at the edge of acceptable quality on LR3 that got dramatically better on LR5)


What did you switch to from Lightroom?


If using Fuji or Sony, there is Capture One Express, which is a basic RAW transformer, catalogue and the ability to do some basic editing. For a hobbyist it's pretty good - and free!


I switched from Lightroom subscriptionware to Capture One payment with one included update. Catalogue with 90k pictures, performance might be a tad slower than LR on my iMac 2017 but so far I am happy with the software when it comes to workflow of importing new photos.

Will never go back to Adobe's ransomware/subscriptions again. Just a happy amateur and in periods it could pass weeks/months between starting up the software.

Although, I do miss photoshop a bit but Gimp does the job "good enough" for me.


I switched to Exposure X5. It's super fast compared to Lightroom and handles large catalogues with ease. Editing is not nearly as nice and it has some weird quirks around UI. I also liked Capture One.


I think if you're a pro, the $600 is not a huge deal, but it's far from free. $0.30/hr assumes that you're using their products 2000 hours a year, or 40 hours per week. I'd expect that someone like a photographer might use it 1-2 hours per work day, which ends up being $2-3 per hour.

For someone like me that has occasion to use something like Photoshop or Illustrator 3-6 hours per year, the $100-$200 per hour is quite pricey.


$600 a year is cheap for professional full-time use. But if you use it professionally and full-time, then you're going to want the latest stable version anyway. The people using CS2 and 3 are not that target audience. They are the people for whom $600 is a lot of money and who will not give their money to Adobe ever again after this.


> $600 a year isn't particularly expensive (that's for Creative Cloud).

Step out of your high pay bubble. That's a ton of money for the majority of the population. It's fine for corporate professional use but completely inaccessible to most people.


It's expensive for professional users too, in a good chunk of Europe a designer might be looking at €1000 a month in income.

The €50 a month is sizable. If you're working with it full time and the client requires it, well fine, otherwise it's €50 to save.


https://www.gimp.org

https://krita.org/en

If you donate anything near what you would have paid for Adobe, then these projects will be awash in resources.


Also just to put my money where my mouth is, I've donated to both of these just now. Nothing crazy or generous -- only $50/€50, but every little bit counts.

How do you know I actually donated? Well Krita emailed me a donation # but I'm not sure if that's persionally identifying or not, but if you really care email me and I'll share that with you, or screenshots of my paypal statement bill or something.

Oh also totally overlooked (can't edit now) Inkscape, which I personally know I've used in the last year, same amount:

https://inkscape.org/support-us/donate/

For those who don't have money to spare, donating time or speaking well of these programs and increasing their adoption are just fine as contributions (at least I think so, maybe others might disagree).

[EDIT] - If you don't have money but you have time and expertise to contribute a translation/pull request/etc that's actually worth even more than the money you could give and it would pay off repeatedly, forever. I've actually done the bare minimum by giving money since I know contributing a code fix or feature implementation/etc would be way more valuable.


That's a really interesting assertion. I have a feeling you could throw arbitrary amount of money at GIMP and it will still be almost useless.


They don't have many developers and they have been undertaking work to sort out the fundamental tech, to sort out age-old bugbears.

In the meantime, the team from ZeMarmot have been making concrete changes in features and UI, with a funding level, that I certainly couldn't live off.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if they were funded to the level of just one developers salary.

Here's whats left before GIMP 3 can be released https://www.patreon.com/posts/40087754

Getting the Gtk 3 version out should be a boost, there is way less between Gtk3 and the upcoming 4 too so the way ahead is good.


By 'almost useless' you mean 'almost useless to someone expecting an open source clone of the leading proprietary software'.

We all too often look at open source software and think of it as a clone of an 'equivalent'. Journalists and others lead us to believe that the likes of the GIMP team are striving to create a clone of Photoshop, or that the Inkscape team are striving to create a version of Illustrator or that the OpenOffice team are playing catchup with Microsoft Office.

If you are a developer with basic image manipulation needs and some specific needs such as being able to save files to a specific colour depth in a specific format, then GIMP is what you want. Admittedly you are not going to be able to do the things a designer does in Photoshop but that is not the point.

Same with OpenOffice Calc, it is a spreadsheet program but not a clone of Excel. It has a different demographic of users, some of whom would consider Excel to be the wrong tool as it magically autocorrects and thinks it knows best, with an interface that obfuscates important (to the programmer) details file save options.

Inkscape - the alleged open source clone of Illustrator is not that at all. It is an editor for SVG files and is a better tool than Illustrator for that specific task of creating optimised SVG files. You can do some design with it too, but it has technical applications and a user base that prefer it because it caters to their needs.

Some people that are used to the market leading software come with preconceptions about what free and open source software is about and how the user interfaces should be improved. Meanwhile, long time users of the open source software, can be mightily relieved that their chosen software is different to what the majority thinks is better.


As a (former) long-time GIMP hater, they actually fixed a lot of my biggest complaints with it a year or two ago. Definitely still far short of Photoshop in terms of a lot of features, but the UI doesn't make me want to stab myself anymore


They don't have many developers and they have been undertaking work to sort out the fundamental tech, to sort out age-old bugbears.

In the meantime, the team from ZeMarmot have been making concrete changes in features and UI, with a funding level, that I certainly couldn't live off.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if they were funded to the level of just one developers salary.


> awash in resources


You can lift the suspension and cut off the top but a Cadillac is never going to be a Jeep.


Also a stellar Photoshop alternative is Paint.NET https://www.getpaint.net/

I wasn't happy with GIMP's interface since way back but this one fulfills pretty much my every need, and I gather would for most other users too (excluding heavy professional users). Give this one also a spin


It's 2020, the ipad is 10 years old. It was a revolutionary product. Some people stood in line for hours to be the first to own it. Well that reminds me, i do own one!

Get it out of the closet and ah, the battery is depleted. Who expects it to hold charge after... 8 years? I don't have a cable either. I have lightning though, even usb-c. But nope, it's the old 30 pin charger. Order it online.

Still works! Except, I haven't successfully managed to download a single app. It hangs forever. Same thing for itunes.


I dug out my old Palm Visor Platinum (released in 2000) a few months ago. Works perfectly. I was even able to find a large collection of apps and transfer to it using the handspring sync program which runs ok in compatibility mode on Win10.

It uses AAA cells so battery is never a problem. I really wish we could go back to standard replaceable batteries for phones and laptops :(

Amazing what we can do if we don't artificially hobble our own engineering prowess.


I recently got a Palm m125, brand new in box, from eBay, for tinkering purposes.

The biggest hassle was setting up sync with the desktop, because that requires their app and drivers. But even that was ultimately a solvable problem on Win10.

But the old Palm apps install and work just fine, if you can find them. A more annoying problem is that a lot of them were shareware, and authors have long since moved on. But even with what's free, it's a handy little device; I can't think of many other AAA-powered gadgets that are capable of compiling C apps for themselves!

As far as battery life goes, I'll just quote one Amazon review from 2001:

> Another negative feature with this specific model is the poor battery life. The m125 requires 2 AAA batteries (included), however they only last aprox. 2.5 weeks under normal use (compared to the 1-2 months of the m105 and most other PDA's).

Sigh.


There never were "standard replaceable batteries" for either phones, or laptops.

Replaceable? Yes. Standard? Big, big huge no.


Define standard. Standard as in rechargeable Ni-MH battery size AA or AAA which were widespread available at that time? Then yes, Motorola, Alcatel (I believe Siemens had one too) could be operated on those batteries.


Fair enough. Very very very few devices, however.


Many laptop power packs from before the thinness craze set in are nothing more but a couple 18650 cells and a BMS. Even the new ones are the same thing, but with pouch cells - you may or may not have to deal with smaller replacements and BMSes that permanently brick themselves when you remove the cell voltage.


Thats some pretty horrific shit considering I have dot com era machines lying around still running fine


My original PSP is not as impressive. But when I found it a couple of months ago I really enjoyed flOw and NFS: Underground Rivals from 2008 or so.


I have a 1991 Macintosh with some expansion cards that I use for making music. It still works perfectly.


I should see if we can still start my dad's old 1984 Acorn Electron and then play the original Elite.


I remember the OG iPad had a pathetic amount of RAM, so that might be your issue;

I use my iPad3 (2012) for Netflix and light browsing and it works great. The battery even holds plenty of charge.

The App Store and Apple Music work fine.

The YouTube app stopped working because the app demands an update that Google didn’t make available for that generation of iPad. Watching YT via Safari still works.

My only complaint is that adblockers don’t work because that generation of iPad doesn’t have a 64bit CPU.


IT has gone for the worse and I feel like what SV has turned into is partly to blame.


I still have my original iPad Mini. It's the only device that has installed and can play the games I made when I worked for an app company back in 2011-2012 that went out of business. Once it dies I'll be a sad panda :(.


This is one of the reasons I no longer buy iDevices. Last time I tried to get my iPad 2 working it was stuck on the activation screen. I shouldn't need to "activate" hardware I own, I should be able to use it however I want.


I found this week that Adobe Fireworks CS6 no longer activates with a Creative Cloud subscription. I’ve been a Creative Cloud customer since launch but now have to crack my copy of Adobe Fireworks CS6 to use it. Horrific thought for me since I hate using hacks to run software (who the hell really knows what is in there) but I can’t find another way to use it legally (no one has a copy for sale second hand).

I’d switch but I am very busy with work and can’t justify the time to learn new software right now while I still know all the features of Fireworks as I’ve used it since Macromedia introduced it.

I wish upon wish that Adobe had just made it possible to obtain a license key for it that worked offline.

Really upset at Adobe right now about this but also can’t imagine switching since everyone in the industry uses their file types.

I won’t invest my time in learning more of their products after this though.


I loved to develop websites in Fireworks and Dreamweaver. Man, those were good programs. This was during Macromedia times, though. I don't know how it changed with Adobe.

Obviously, nowadays web development is more complex than just throwing together some HTML, CSS and some PHP inserts. But the workflow these programs had was really thought out and pleasant.

Also, I highly suggest this video tutorial of building a modern website with truly modern techniques using Dreamweaver: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R64vGpluA3s


Oh that's rubbish to hear.

I started out using Fireworks in 2003(?) when I bought Macromedia Studio, and find it's still faster for me to use than Photoshop for a handful of tasks. And the way its layers work has always been more intuitive than Photoshop to me.

So this sucks, as it's the one app I wouldn't want to let go of until I can find something to replace it. I suspect Sketch would, but I'm a Windows user.


Just curious, what is Fireworks used in?


Web development for me. It’s the most logical layer based editor I have ever used.


Interesting, I didn't know that it had the tools to work with the myriad different device sizes and resolutions. I used it back in the day but I was just making static images to be sliced into image maps


I discovered this at the start of lockdown when our hackspace got donated some older iMacs and full copies of CS3. Apparently if you got in contact with them when they first announced the retirement they were giving out activation-free installers to people who could prove ownership. It'd be lovely if someone has these archived somewhere for those of us that weren't quick enough.


It'd be lovely if you had contact information in your profile ;)


...just thought I'd mention here that I have my contact information in mine.


... and I always make sure mine is in my profile too!

You know... just in case!


Actually it's not, you need to add it to your about text for it to be visible.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=firecall in an incognito browser window.


Hi there. I hope this is kosher, but I just added my contact info to my profile ;) I own Photoshop CS3 on Windows and would love to keep using it too!


Hi, please get in touch with me if you read this. My email is in my profile. Many thanks!


have just updated it - <hacker-news-handle>@gmail.com :)

You have the potential to make a couple of our more creative members extremely happy :)


gotmail.wav


It will really appreciate if someone has the same but for Windows install. I help a very poor shop and we had the same problem so we are using activators as Adobe won't help anymore.


Why not just pirate at that point?


Because we're a hackspace so I couldn't risk getting caught doing that. Totally had nothing to do with my failing to find useful OSX installers and cracks for the version we had :)


Sure I'll pay for your software. I'll even print out the receipt. Download link? Nah, thanks, i'll just torrent it, because when you retire your ridiculous DRM that is phoning home, I still want to use the software I paid for. Thanks!


The problem is, how do you make sure it has no virus?


Same problem applies to legal software as well if you're not building from source. And even if building from source, do you usually review it?


Alexa, show me how to drive a significant portion of your customer base towards unashamed piracy.


Or better yet, an open source alternative. I like both GIMP and Krita.

The problem with piracy is that it still ends up with more people knowing the proprietary software, and thus helps it keep the position cemented.


Photopea.com is exactly like photoshop, it's free, web based or download!


I mean this is the same trap, one day the website won't be around, then what will you do?


It can be run offline. I’m sure there are already archives of the whole thing floating around.


That's definitely a good choice for those used to Photoshop, I can barely use PS now, so it's probably not a good fit for me.

Anything to pull from PS's dominance is good though!


This is pretty amazing, so glad you posted it. It has layer blending options and shadow/highlights, two feature I can't live without and are often missing in free editors. The menus are exactly like photoshop. And finally an API that lets you save/load PSD/images to and from cloud storage.


Yeah it's one guy's project, and he is a monster. Check out the reddit AMA if you get a chance.


My notions might be outdated, but doesn't GIMP still lack CMYK support, which is sort of the default in the printing world?


It's not a proper CMYK support - https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GIMP/CMYK_support#About... You can do separation and editing from there.


No idea. I think I heard somewhere that it supports it now, but I barely use GIMP, and definitely don't print anything I use with it.

Most of what I do I use Krita or more obscure tools for.


GIMP is great for a lot of stuff, but it's like comparing the usability of FreeBSD to ios


You mean it's far more usable for a lot of tasks?


But less polished. It does seem like a good analogy.


GIMP is easy, the problem is CMYK.


I have tried to use GIMP, but in my experience the UI is just so unintuitive and hard to use.


When was the last time you used it? The UI has improved significantly in the last two years or so


Not too long ago, probably earlier this year


I tried to use gimp and I really wanted to like it, but I can’t. It’s clumsy and looks like death. I’d rather pay for something more polished.


I don't get this. I've used GIMP and Phptoshop and the UI differences are trivial.


Really? To give just one example, if I press cmd-T in PS, I go into an editing mode where I can translate, rotate, and scale a layer with intuitive, contextual mouse controls for each. With GIMP it's broken up into separate commands. I didn't spend so much time with it, but with PS things got guessable very quickly, where with GIMP it felt like the features are just stuffed in there wherever they can fit.


That proves the point, you simply don't know how to use Gimp yet. It is called "Unified Transform", available on the default toolbar or by pressing "shift-t". So the difference is literally pressing shift instead of control, a trivial difference by any standard, and reconfigurable as well.


Yes it does prove the point. So if I look at these docs[0], this tool, not only does it do translate/rotate/scale, which are the most fundamental image transformations in 2D editing, but it also does shearing and perspective transformations which are rarely used by comparison. This tool was clearly designed from an implementation-driven perspective (just put all the affine transformations in one place) rather than a UX driven perspective (no designer places these tools together conceptually).

On top of that, this tool still sits along side other single purpose tools for scaling and rotating, which are the first results if you search "how to rotate in GIMP", so why should I even expect this tool to exist?

This is not intuitive UX which is "trivially different" to PS, this is a mess which can only be learned through laborious trial and error, or reading the documentation like a book.

[0]:https://docs.gimp.org/2.10/en/gimp-tool-unified-transform.ht...


Many open source projects such as Gimp have a serious UX problem. Software engineers are great at delivering efficient systems. In terms of usability they’re arrogant and inflexible. They’re two different skills and I wish project maintainers understood that.


I want to like it, but GIMP is almost unusable for me. Really hard to do even basics, and have to spend a lot of time googling how to do what I want to do.


You wouldn't expect Photoshop to be immediately usable for a newbie either. I've always been completely stumped by Photoshop, but I haven't spent enough time in it to expect otherwise.


True, but I've been using GIMP a long time - more than a decade. Used it for years longer and years before I used Adobe CS. Taken a number of tutorials on it. Will always be super clunky.


All I really want is Fireworks. Never found a true replacement for it.


To be fair, photoshop probably has more people working on UX than the entire team which maintains Gimp. Of course it will be better in that regard.


> the UI differences are trivial.

That depends on which version you use. IIRC the version in the Ubuntu/*buntu repo's have a patch to bring the UI closer to PS, at least in appearance.

There are also some functions which you have to do differently in GIMP vs PS.


Most Mac users just want something that works, open source.and freedom is not important


I'm a huge fan of FOSS, but open source products also have to stand on their own merits. The best way for FOSS to succeed is for FOSS products to be as good or better than closed alternatives. Otherwise they will always be relegated to a small audience of a few die-hards.


Adobe installs an epic amount of phone-home crapware on your PC. Another reason to used a cracked version


Significant portion of what kind of users exactly? Professionals upgrade their software and I could bet that 13 years old software is nowhere near of being significant. It’s the same kind of stupidity like shouting that Microsoft EOLed XP. ;-)


I’m no designer, but my previous workflows relied quite a bit on core functionality found in versions of CS going back to at least CS3. I’ve used CS3, CS4, CS6, and more recently CC. I only used CC because CS6 no longer worked on macOS, and I only used CS6 because I couldn’t get a legit older version (also student discount).

I found it to be a treadmill - the prices went up until Adobe decided that you could no longer purchase anything outright and now had to rent it. Newer versions looked prettier, but the performance and stability dropped.

I’d reckon that the vast majority of people using CC would be happy with an older version and just as productive. CC6 and later are resource hogs that are constantly calling home. Today, I’d be hard pressed to choose CC over a pirated copy or other alternative, and I’ve known a few designers that stuck with cracked copies of CS.


And I’m using Adobe software from Photoshop 6, and upgraded with each new version to gain features and performance that wasn’t available with previous releases. I wasn’t happy with cloud option, but it’s still cheaper than buying boxed versions of Adobe soft. And no, not even one professional will use CS for anything other, than amusement on old hardware.

> Today, I’d be hard pressed to choose CC over a pirated copy or other alternative, and I’ve known a few designers that stuck with cracked copies of CS.

He’s not a designer, his a pirate. If you do a professional work, you pay for tools you use. Simple as that. If you want to say, that they are pricy then use some free alternative (they existed, and are great), or cheaper pro software like from Serif.


I would be willing to bet that less than 1% of adobe users were still using cs2 or 3. Anyone doing it for a living isn't going to blink at the subscription price (if they even had to pay for it personally).


Fuck Adobe. When Creative Cloud was launched, the CEO promised that he would support existing CS6 customers like myself who had paid a lot of money for the master collection. And then, few years later, they announced they wouldn't support CS6 much anymore (atleast for Mac OS X Catalina users).

After getting screwed royally, I shut down all my accounts with them and switched to Serif's Affinity Photo and Designer which are the equivalents of Photoshop and Illustrator which are two of the most used software packages for me.

They had a 50% off sale going on during the pandemic and I think honestly it was worth every single penny and more and it has already paid for itself from a new client project.

Fuck Adobe. We should all be boycotting them for the way they treat their customers.


They supported it for 5 years. Seems very reasonable to me.


I thought back in 2013 Adobe made a download available for Creative Suite 2 that did not require an activation server for install:

https://www.cnet.com/news/adobe-releases-creative-suite-2-fo...

However it looks like this download is not available anymore.


It's available in the web archive, among other places.


I tried yo search one of the link from CNET news in archive.org. It said archived is removed (per request)


You need to search for the filenames and direct links. I have an old comment here linking to a different archive that has the original direct links on the page with the serials.

(Adobe is certainly trying to make it hard to find, which I'm not surprised about.)


This is a fundamental problem with commercial software. 15 years ago when this software was released the choice to have server authentication essentially was the original sin.


See also, Windows and activation. Adding that to XP was where Microsoft began to boil the frog, and now they're slowly doing to Office what Adobe did to CS.


No, it's a fundamental problem with Adobe software.


It's a problem that is not limited to Adobe, and is a by-product of their commercial nature. The need for artificial scarcity (in this instance really really artificial) .


No, it's a fundamental problem with proprietary software: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24831699


Semi-related: tried using Adobe XD once to practice UI graphic design and apparently they wont support windows 10 ltsb. Loyal Figma customer now.


I bet the warez versions install and "activate" just fine, though. Another well deserved win for DRM.


I was surprised how easy it was. I searched for a version for my cousin to use (she doesn't have the money and won't make money from using it, but she was taught how to use it in school).

The warez scene nowadays have pre-patched *.iso versions of the whole Creative Suite (last years version I believe). No need for a keygen, messing with your hosts file or manually replacing files after install.

Not that I trust those, I didn't run them on my PC, just tried it out in a VM. If they went through all the effort of creating that version, then I don't really trust it to not contain a cryptominer of botnet client.


> You can no longer reinstall Creative Suite 2 or 3 even if you have the original installation disks. The aging activation servers for those apps had to be retired.

I always wonder if a situation like this is legal. If I purchased a product and want to keep using it, what right does the seller have to prevent me from doing so x years later?

Can I sue them for not selling me the product they said they were selling me?


I’m sure there’s a provision that protects them in the EULA you agreed to when you purchased it.

Isn’t it a moot point anyway because nobody ever “buys” software, they just obtain a license to use it. Ownership is such a convoluted concept in tech, particularly in software.


That’s somewhat sketchy with pre boxed software. Old Nintendo cartridges just worked and presumably had zero copyright issues. If you’re buying/using hardware with software preinstalled, at what point did you agreed to the EULA?


I'm glad you qualified "old", because I tried to run some Switch games from the cartridge when I was at a cottage with no connectivity, and both games forbade me from playing without updating first.


This is what kills me about the xbone, games come on disks, but immediately want to call home before allowing play. Game calls home, and realizes it needs a 8GB patch! Proceeds to download patch at 500Kb/sec on my 100's of Mbit/sec internet connection.

Then despite probably "authenticating" itself to the xbone, won't actually run unless the disk is in the drive.

(don't get me started on how bad the UI is, I really haven't any idea why gamers love those little machines so much, they are mostly just trash).


>Isn’t it a moot point anyway because nobody ever “buys” software, they just obtain a license to use it.

Well, depends on the country. In Germany that's not a thing because contract law doesn't allow it. Either you buy software or you rent it.


Maybe someone can crack the code to not require activation?

You did purchase the software after all, and unless you are illegally distributing it I see it as a perfectly fine thing to do whatever you want within your own private residence.


> You did purchase the software after all

Err, umm, no. You purchased a license to use the software.


I run my life by morals, not by law, but with a risk tolerance bounded by the effects of law.

That said, my moral interpretation of closed-source software is that I can do whatever the hell I want with it as long as I'm not distributing it to others without permission. Anything that enters my private residence, whether it be a CD I may have bought, or a very long byte array that got transmitted into my internal LAN in return for a payment, is fair game for me to do anything I want with, as long as it doesn't reach anyone outside.


Not really?

If you have the disks, you bought a copy of it, just like you bought a copy of a book, not a license to read it's pages.


Modifying the binary is not same as copying . Also given thay Adobe has failed to their side of the agreement, there is some legal standing.

Ofcourse it has to be tested in court, unlikely Adobe will even sue if they knew. I don't think they care one way or another. And the customer using cs2 still is unlikely to sue as it's not going to be a large enterprise.

This is just laziness from Adobe , older servers take effort to maintain. They could be using keys that have expired to be signing the auth request for example.


It's a very long bytearray.

You own a CPU. Because you own that CPU, you get to play gatekeeper and decide which parts of that bytearray go to your CPU and which ones don't. That's not for Adobe to decide.

The bytearray they send you is just a suggestion of what to run on your CPU. They provided you a suggestion in return for a payment.

You don't have to run all of that suggestion. You can selectively run parts of it.


What hardware are you running that old crap code on anyways? If you are in the video world today, those old versions of software can't even handle HD let alone 4K/8K. I couldn't even imagine trying to run RAW video without GPU support. Why are people so clinging on to software that only allows work from 10-15 years ago? Times have progressed. The old software doesn't support anything I need it to today (maybe I could get by with an old version of PS except for today's RAW formats would bring it to its knees).


Nonsense. The disks are your property and you're entitled to use them as you see fit (except when that use is illegal e.g. copyright infringement - and note that copyright does not cover the transitory copies made as part of running the application).


> The disks are your property and you're entitled to use them as you see fit

I guess you can use them as frisbees.


Laws change from place to place and time to time. It might be legal in one place but not another. It might be legal at one time but not another.

The devil is in the details.


There may be some part of the law that prevents you from suing (IANAL), but if it wasn't disclosed before you purchased it, it make intuitive sense to me that you should have grounds to sue.

I felt the same way about the whole Sonos recyling thing too...


Why are they running physical servers for this anyways? Why not just host in the cloud right next to their current servers authenticating recent rental software?


I think any competent lawyer would argue that the software was never guaranteed to have infinite lifespan, and Adobe stopped selling CS3 quite a while ago. The EULA explicitly says they don’t warranty anything past 90 days since sale.

But regardless of that, your damages would be limited to what you spent on the license. So definitely not worth your time.


Don't forget all the time spent learning the beast that is CS3 only to have it stripped away.

What is the value of the years it takes to become proficient with such software? Remember, that investment was made on the back of the idea that the software would continue to be usable.


>But regardless of that, your damages would be limited to what you spent on the license. So definitely not worth your time.

But it could be a class action suit, and if you're the class representative you can get larger compensation.


> But regardless of that, your damages would be limited to what you spent on the license. So definitely not worth your time.

Class action perhaps? Or small claims at the other end?


If you sue Adobe over this they will likely settle over the phone. If you really want to be a jerk, don't settle and make them send a lawyer out to your district. I'm not encouraging any fraud here but if you feel ripped off, a small claims case is totally in order, here. And they normally take about 10 minutes to file for online.


You didn’t own it. You licensed it.


Did you accept the agreement when installing?


The terms of the CS6 license pertaining to activation don't indicate one way or the other what happens if the server was intentionally disabled by Adobe's choice. The only stated requirement is internet access; there's an implied requirement that no firewall is in place to prevent the software from communicating with the Adobe server.


The CS6 license [1] has a 90 day limited warranty in section 6, which, for most goods, means the items will work as intended for at least 90 days, otherwise you can return it for a full refund. It it fails after 90 days, then you generally cannot.

Also, did CS6 stop working? The only stories I see are CS2 and CS3.

[1] https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/cc/en/legal/licenses-terms...


No, I have no reason to believe CS6 stopped working, that's just the only terms I have on my local and I couldn't find an obvious archive of Adobes terms for previous versions.


> Did you accept the agreement when installing?

That actually doesn't matter if the terms are unreasonable.

Courts commonly understand that one-sided unreasonable licenses are unenforceable when litigated.


Are the terms unreasonable? If the terms were a limited license rather than an infinite guarantee to provide activation servers, then it’s not likely legally unreasonable. And it’s not at all uncommon to be the former. I’ve never seen a court rule a license like this to be unreasonable. Have you?

Here’s [1] the CS3 license. It states a 90 day warranty, which is certainly legally a standard warranty. Section 14.8.1 states Adobe can disable the activation server.

So yep, looks like this was covered in the license. I doubt a court is going to rule Adobe must provide a server indefinitely.

[1] https://labs.adobe.com/technologies/eula/photoshopcs3.html


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