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原始链接: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40607442

Adobe 最近的定价政策（包括取消费用和按月订阅）已促使一些用户探索替代方案。许多人发现使用旧版本的 Creative Suite（例如 CS6）更能满足他们的需求。人们越来越担心成熟软件价格不断上涨而不是下降的趋势。用户认为这些做法利用了消费者的信任和隐私。公司的应用程序访问用户数据与公司本身访问用户数据之间的界限越来越模糊，导致了不安。尽管呼吁提供优质的客户服务，但一些人认为我们正在进入一个客户开发而不是改进的新时代。 2015 年的服务条款文件显示，Adobe 需要非排他性的、全球性的、免版税的许可才能出于运营目的使用、复制、公开展示、分发、修改和翻译用户的内容。这引起了人们对知识产权所有权和潜在滥用的担忧。虽然一些人主张抵制这些趋势，但另一些人则建议支持替代的、更便宜的选择，例如 Affinity Photo 或 Inkscape。

To avoid a cancellation fee with Adobe, follow these steps:

1. Change Your Current Plan: First, switch your existing Adobe plan to a different one. This is because Adobe offers a 14-day cancellation period for any new plan.

2. Cancel the New Plan: Wait until the next day, then cancel this new plan. Due to the 14-day cancellation policy, you should be able to do this without incurring any fees.

Explanation: Adobe's policy allows you to cancel a plan within 14 days of purchase without a penalty. By switching to a new plan and then cancelling it within this window, you effectively bypass any cancellation fees that would apply to your original plan.

Adobe is the new comcast... Cancellation fees?

There is also no security in using any other tool, especially with this predatory precedent, and especially if you're designing in a web browser.

My best option is to use a copy of CS6 on a computer I keep offline, really all the content aware and other features issued since CS6 aren't that necessary for me, and by going old school, it sets my artistry apart from everyone else.

It's long overdue for people to resist and reject the price/service manipulation fetish model that is exhibited by many major software companies. These companies shouldn't be saddling consumers with higher and higher prices and monthly subscriptions, and cancellation fees... Prices should be going down over time, not up as products mature.

There is no longer an "older software" sale bin at the computer software store for people that don't have volumes of wealth to spend, and that's pretty crazy to think about... And then on the flip side arbitrarily and illegally sunsetting older software whenever they wish. These companies are not even respecting the EULAs they've issued prior, and scraping older promises off the Internet over time.

Fraudulent exploitative software buy/update/service schemes, even in long-trusted companies, are becoming rampant, it's likely profit desperation, but also highly predatory in all the wrong ways.

I've done this with hotel stays. No fee to change a reservation, but large penalty to cancel with less than 48 hours notice. So you change your reservation for a week later, then cancel it.

This sounds like that story of the elder withdrawing $20 at the bank:

Elder: I want to withdraw $20 from my account.

Teller: You can withdraw $500 minimum here, or use the ATM for small change.

Elder: I'll withdraw $500 then.

Teller: Here you go. Anything else?

Elder: I want to deposit $480 in my account.

Sure. We all know that’d right. Everybody at Adobe knows too.

We also all know that they have the best dark patterns and just-not-too-sketchy business practices. Everybody at Adobe knows too.

Good luck with the fight.

The alternative I tried (successfully):

1. Switch your payment method to PayPal.

2. Cancel the subscription using the Paypal UI

(That was a couple of years ago so I’m not sure if this works)

Their response is basically "we won't abuse it".

Even if we trust them, this response is not good enough for any project under NDA. Unless I can, somehow, put Adobe under the NDA, it's not helping.

Never mention most of us don't actually trust them to be not abusing.

Anyone remember when Instagram changed their TOS and then said "trust us"? And now they're training AI on it.

Nobody's falling for it, Adobe.

All of the stuff that they're saying in that response about how they won't abuse it is stuff that's already in the TOS. If you don't trust them despite that, then you should not be using their products regardless of what the TOS says.

I think we all know that, but we are also commenting on how it’s an awful tack to take for them and that this is likely not for “content moderation” only but for intelligence gathering, AI training, and also opens up all your content for industrial espionage because it leaves what little bit of control you have over your data that Adobe is spying on for themselves and others.

Right out of the gate the phrasing “pushed a routine re-acceptance of those terms” reads with a hint of user contempt, like “just click Accept damnit, it’s normal that there are updates, you’re not supposed to read them”.

Ultimately what I’m getting from the terms directly and their response is that they want to be able to review things that go through their cloud, including with humans manually looking at it, but have given themselves a broader general license to review anything you open or create with their software, with a “trust us” message on the side saying it’s just for specific purposes. Additionally since all software these days seems to want you to save everything to the cloud, you’re likely to be prompted many times to save files there, where they may be subject to manual review even under the “trust us” purposes.

it is in their interest to make the permissions in the TOS they grant themselves as broad as possible, since it's free to them (at least, they assume people don't care).

It's good that this is getting attention, because the change supposedly already have been put in since Feb 2024! It's only recently that the UI exposed it with the accept screen!

I say that the laws should be changed such that TOS cannot actually be changed from the time the contract was signed, unless a new commercial contract be signed for the new TOS.

How it works for people doing handling material that obviously violates ToS? It would be expected for police investigators, war crime prosecutors, etc?

Imagine that a crime ends up impune because adobe decides to delete part of the proofs!

There is a special version of Photoshop like the ltsc versions of windows but they are not as easily accessible. They come without a subscription though.

> [Human or automated review] [a]ccess is needed for Adobe applications and services to perform the functions they are designed and used for (such as opening and editing files for the user or creating thumbnails or a preview for sharing).

You dummies, it's needed! They have to access our data, it's needed!

N.b. this is one of the worse examples of corporate writing I've seen in recent memory. I feel like this entire thing is gaslighting the reader and using corpo jargon to make the thing easier to swallow.

Self-replying since the sibling is getting buried.

What they say:

> Access is needed for Adobe applications and services to perform the functions they are designed and used for (such as opening and editing files for the user or creating thumbnails or a preview for sharing).

What you read:

> A tautology: in order to open a file on your computer for use in an Adobe app, that app will need to open a file ("access") on your computer.

What they actually mean:

> Adobe can review ("access") any data you put into their apps and services. For instance, if you open a file in Photoshop, Adobe can have a human or an automated process review that file. This behavior is needed.

A huge part of this is the awful business-y passive tone they are using to disguise intent: "access is needed" - access by whom, and to what? Needed why?

I think one of the fundamental problems here is that the line has become blurred between "Company can access user's data" and "Company's application can access user's data."

In the past, this was pretty clear. The application is running on my computer, unconnected to the outside world, running on my behalf, in order to do what I want it to do. When I ran Borland's C++ compiler on DOS, I would have never even considered "Borland" having access to my data.

These days, with every device connected to the Internet, companies are deliberately blurring the line between the application and the company that made it. If my iPhone accesses my location, is Apple accessing my location? Who knows? Some people think no, some people think yes. If my Windows PC takes a screenshot of my desktop, is Microsoft accessing the contents of my desktop? No clue. They say they aren't, but all they can offer for proof is "Trust me, bro."

I'm so tired of software that is so hopelessly intertwined and tethered to the software's vendor. When I buy a software from someone, I buy it in order to use it, by itself, with no "help" from the vendor. I don't want a relationship with my software vendor. I just want to use the software alone.

The corpo jargon has gotten to you! "Access" doesn't mean "the app accesses a file on your computer." It means the company has access to your data. You would be forgiven for thinking this, as I assume it was their intent that you be confused.

The phrase refers to 2.2 "Our Access to Your Content" - https://www.adobe.com/legal/terms.html

Anyway, I have utmost faith that an app can open and edit files without calling home.

Well, considering how GitHub's ToS was defended as "but they need it to host your code" and was what ended up as their justification for feeding all of your code into Copilot, I don't think that argument aged well.

They could specify a minimal set of permissions they need from you to offer their service but they deliberately worded it as ambiguously as possible to allow them to change their mind later. The question isn't what they need it for, the question is what they can justify later with the language they use now.

The quote is,

> Access is needed for Adobe applications and services to perform the functions they are designed and used for.

...which boils down to, 'we need access to your stuff to do what we want'... which is not very reassuring.

The thumbnail example was just 1 example. Another example would be an adobe service designed for training AI on your content.

As long as the service designed for training AI on your content only accesses and uses your data for training AI on your content, it would be in compliance with these terms.

What TOS doesn't say "we need to ability to show you your own images" in stupid legal terms that sounds like they're going to steal all your stuff?

And the law insists that all cloud data is scanned for CSAM

Considering the news of Nintendo tracing leaks to Google contractors viewing their private YouTube this seems like a total mess waiting to happen.

For those that have not worked near big advertising launches for physical products these NDAs are taken very seriously. The simple reason is leaks profoundly impact the value of inventory.

Google’s efforts there seem laudable. They have an internal db for tracking issues that employees identify, resolve them promptly (according to the notes in the db and their response to the article authors), and generally seem to be taking the issues reported seriously.

I have more trust for google after reading that, which is not what I expected

I will never every trust real content to be on Cloud of any of these big corp, or any software going towards an online like photoshop is going.

USB is way better than online for privacy and security.

I have an Android app which I developed just for me. I use it to record bike rides, see weather forecasts, see who called on the landline and the like. It's not published nor uploaded to Google Play or elsewhere, because it is just for me.

When I upgraded it today to a new version, my Pixel phone told me that I have to upload the app to Google, so that they can security-check it. Previously there was an option where you could select something like "don't check".

It's somehow the same as with this Adobe issue. Google now has a copy of my app even though I just installed my app on my phone.

If now a Google employee installs the app on a device to "check" it, he will be able to see my power consumption, see who called, listen to voice messages, and so on.

Are you referring to this: https://support.google.com/android/answer/2812853 If so, do the directions mentioned there help?

The situation you are describing is not morally the same. (edit: striking through this part ~~Adobe's desire for their customers' content is to use it to develop AI tools that Adobe can then resell to its customers.~~) The security checkup you are talking about is intended to combat a real problem that unsophisticated smartphone users are victim to.

Adobe's request to access your content is not based out of intending to safeguard unsophisticated users.

Imagine if Microsoft had to sign off on every single program you write for your own windows box in the name of privacy and safety. It certainly does feel like we're moving in that direction, really.

> he will be able to see my power consumption, see who called, listen to voice messages, and so on

So is your API key baked into the app? Implement a login screen or a field for the API key and then who cares if Google has a copy of your app, they can't access your data.

There is no API key. The URLs are not public, not guessable, and traffic runs over HTTPS. Any attempt at accessing a wrongly guessed URL bans the IP address. I have no intention to rewrite this stuff.

You need to have the app to get to know the URLs.

Randomly generated url (even by a bad random generator like a human) is equivalent to an API key. Your exact same argument you made about the url can be made about a baked in API key.

Implement auth, do extremely basic auth if you have to using http basic auth over https and check against a hardcoded value on the server, it's not secure by any stretch of the imagination but is better than giving "api keys" to any intermediary that can do a string dump on your APK...

Absolutely sure. It's this "Google Play Protect"-feature. I have multiple apps, and they used to trigger randomly these scan requests on upgrades for maybe two years, but with today's install it appears that they have changed how they deal with this, where you no longer have a choice.

Maybe it's because it has extensive permissions wich I need in order to get access to my data usage, but that's not the point. Then again, it also happens with apps which don't require many permissions.

The devil really is in the details here, a tweet further down the thread quotes the new terms of use: https://x.com/Stretchedwiener/status/1798390688830402802

> Solely for the purposes of operating or improving the Services and Software, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, license, to use, reproduce, publicly display, display, distribute, modify, create derivate works based on, publicly perform, and translate the content

(typed from the image, may have some mistakes!)

Which to be seems astounding! Especially for professional software such as photoshop where many many of its users will be working on behalf of clients and this clause would likely breach agreements with those clients and for other users making content for themselves they understandably don't want to allow Adobe to 'publicly display' their work.

You can only grant something you have the rights to, so basically, they are asking you to do something you can't.

I don't have the rights of my client's product.

I want to see how it plays in court.

If I'm signing a contract to sell you something I don't have, e.g., the Brooklyn Bridge, then I'm liable.

If you sign a contract to license something to Adobe that you don't have the rights to, you're now at fault.

Either get a good liability insurance, or avoid using Adobe.

> Either get a good liability insurance, or avoid using Adobe

Or get the client to direct you to use Adobe even with this clause.

Easiest solution is to get the client and Adobe to agree to what rights each of them get.

THIS. And the moment that the client expresses reservations about this strategy (which your approach to the subject was trying to elicit), you start talking about the alternatives to continued use of Adobe.

You granting someone rights to material you don’t have makes you liable twice right? If your friend lent you his car and you lent it to someone else, you become liable twice not zero times.

You don't have the right to upload your client's product, yet you use software that uploads your client's product.

You're correct that the two conflict, but I think the courts would have a problem with you for using a product that breaches the employment contract you signed rather than rule that Adobe is at fault here.

I think so, you have to pull in the customer and let them know you planning on using the adobe product and since adobe demands they have full access to the customer’s proprietary media they will have to agree to that as well. How that happens I’m not sure? Have them buy an adobe license for you to use? I guess at that point you need lawyers or their full permission to hand over their ideas to Adobe, otherwise you’re gonna be libel if it leaks/gets copied/etc

It seems that the business world has traversed four distinct eras, even though various companies appear to be in different stages of each:

The Era of Volume Sales: Customer was just a number, and the primary goal was to maximize profits. Sears and so on...

Required Relationships but Poor Service: Businesses recognized the need for customer relationships but failed to deliver effective customer service. Like in monopolistic AT&T, where customer service was notoriously bad...

Stellar Customer Service At Least As An Idea: Businesses began focusing on exceeding customer expectations with exceptional service. Early Amazon, Zappos and so on

New Era of Customer Exploitation: Companies move to a stage where they exploit their customers by overstepping privacy provisions or signed agreements, driven by the desire to maximize ad revenue or leverage data for AI. Facebook...Adobe...examples so many there is even no need to add more...

It's been that way for the Service as far back as Archive.org has archived Adobe's general terms of service which was 2015-05-31. Here was the TOS then:

> 3.2 Licenses to Your Content in Order to Operate the Services. We require certain licenses from you to your content to operate and enable the Services. When you upload content to the Services, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sub-licensable, and transferrable license to use, reproduce, publicly display, distribute, modify (so as to better showcase your content, for example), publicly perform, and translate the content as needed in response to user driven actions (such as when you choose to store privately or share your content with others). This license is only for the purpose of operating or improving the Services.

They changed from "Services" to "Services and Software" in June of 2018:

> 4.3 Licenses to Your Content in Order to Operate the Services and Software. We require certain licenses from you to your Content in order to operate and enable the Services and Software. When you upload Content to the Services and Software, you grant us a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license to use, reproduce, publicly display, distribute, modify (so as to better showcase your Content, for example), publicly perform, and translate the Content as needed in response to user driven actions (such as when you choose to privately store or share your Content with others). This license is only for the purpose of operating or improving the Services and Software.

A lot of these services have draconian terms, but nobody reads them. It's kind of funny that an innocent change in one part of the agreement might prompt people to read the whole agreement and realize there are outrageous parts that have been there forever.

One agreement I do read carefully every time is employment contracts, and it always makes me extremely angry, but what am I going to do? My family needs to eat. I sometimes complain about certain terms to co-workers and they almost always comment that their contract didn't have those terms, but I bet it does and they just didn't read it.

but I bet it does and they just didn't read it

Actually, in my case, it’s true.

I had three terms removed from my contract that I didn’t like - initialed by both me and our CFO/Legal Counsel, and further annotated at the end of the contract before we both signed.

She told me at the time that I was the first person to ask for this in the 15 years she’d been there.

Way back in the 1990s in the UK I refused to sign a contract that had terms I saw as being illegal (pertaining to holiday/PTO).

The three directors finally agreed to remove the terms (after wasting 2 months on it) the same day I turned in my notice to start a new job paying £6K more without dumb requirements in the contract!

> but what am I going to do?

While employed, looking for a different buyer of your labor at preferable terms. During the negotiation process, cross out anything you disagree with.

I mean if you’ve been using their products for years or even decades, it would be a hard pill to swallow that to now get work done for a client you have to move over to gimp or photopea because of this ridiculous new license.

IANAL, but it seems to me that this is meaningless, vague, non-enforceable legal dribble, probably designed as some kind of catch-all for internal purposes (indeed, it even says it’s for “operating or improving the Services or Software”). Obviously Adobe would still be subject to copyright infringement laws if they were to ever actually use a client’s work for profit. This TOS does not exempt a corporation from an entire class of laws designed to protect copyright holders.

Yes, that's exactly what Instagram argued when they changed their TOS, too.

And now they're training AI on your images.

Never trust a corporation when it says "trust us".

IANAL. See the part about "grant license". This is all about copyright.

Legalese seems to be a "choose your own adventure"--or rather, "choose your own permutation"--that results in many simple statements. One of those simple statements would be: "For the purposes of improving the software, you grant us license to create derivative works based on your content."

I get what you’re saying, but consider that I could take someone’s work of art and create infinite derivatives of it, which is not illegal, unless I try to claim them as my own and sell them.

Almost all the instances of people getting upset by language like that it's because they refuse to understand that it's required for you the customer being able to share the photo with others.

Why sublicense? Well, because the way they create the service may involve a third party CDN.

In this case though, the limiting part where this license will ONLY be used to do what you the customer intended (e.g. share or publish the photo on their platform) is missing. And that's suspicious.

but it didn't matter weather they have a reasonable use case for it

it's a gross overreach they could abuse at any point in time without any additional consent from you

one which can force you to grant them permissions you legally are not allowed to do

weather they had no intention to to abuse it really is irrelevant as long as they didn't legally constrain themselves further in ways they don't do

furthermore given Adobes post actions assuming they have no intention to abuse it and will not start having such intentions in the future is IMHO highly foolish with a large degree of worldly innocence

The main issue with "Cancel Adobe" is that it's very naïve to assume that a nontrivial percentage of people using it can realistically switch to something else.

Seriously. It's losing many weeks of your life to retrain in alternatives to Premiere, Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects. If not months.

Not to mention it's often simply not a choice at all, because you have to collaborate with people who only work in those file formats.

This is my hugest gripe with Linux.

Everything I normally use on Windows can be replaced with the exception of Adobe, and it massively affects any ability to be creative or use something like Ubuntu as a daily driver

If I'm reading the ToS correctly, it implies that a creative who uses Adobe products is granting Adobe a license to all content anyong creates on their platform. So this is something that can happen:

1. Alice signs the ToS, granted Adobe a non-exclusive license to all work created using Adobe products.

2. Disney (or insert your own litigious company here) hires Alice to do some art. Alice and Disney sign a contract that says Disney owns the IP to the art outright and Alice retains no rights to the work.

3. Alice makes the art. Alice gives the Art to Disney. Disney pays Alice.

4. Adobe thinks the art is great, and puts the art on stock.adobe.com, using the license that Alice granted them.

5. Chuck's Ads hires Bob to do some art; they sign a contract that allows Bob to use stock art for some of the elements.

6. Bob makes the art using stock art; specifically using Alice's art which Adobe has put on stock.adobe.com.

7. Bob sells the art to Chuck's Ads. Chuck's Ads runs the ad nationwide. The company who is making the advertised product likes the art and puts it on the box which is sold in stores.

8. Disney's flesh eating lawyers see the ad and start suing everybody.

What happens to Alice? From where I sit, it seems like she gets hit by a breach of contract; she granted Adobe a license which she didn't have the right to grant.

What happens to Bob? Certainly Chuck's Ads will get sued to Disney, and they won't be happy about it. It stands to reason that Chuck's Ads and/or Disney will sue Bob for breach of contract and/or copyright infringement respectively.

You're correct. I'm not saying you're wrong. It is naive to assume people can just "Cancel Adobe." But it's also naive to assume people who get paid to use this product suite don't legally have to.

If you use a proprietary format and don't archive the executables to read them, it's simply not reasonable to expect such an archive to last 14 years. Nothing to do with this TOS change. You should have taken action when they started with the subscription model and creative cloud thing. People have been warning about this.

But what were you supposed to do right? Use some software with the eraser in a weird place??

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40607704

It seems to me not worth the tradeoff.

I have a lot of old AE projects I sometimes need to modify for clients, so I need AE for those.

Since I can create the same titles/animations in Apple Motion in a fraction of the time that they take to create in AE, I use that for all newer projects.

If you limit your actions in life to only "the things that cause me zero inconvenience right now", you will be played like a fiddle your entire life. Literally everyone who wants to control in any way for any reason knows this one simple trick, and I don't just mean the big things, but the little things like marketing tricks, cell phone contracts, etc.

If you get used to the need to occasionally take a short-term hit for a long-term win, it gets easier over time. It's a good thing to practice, in all senses of the term.

If everyone actually did switch, the options would become better through the increased resources the alternatives would get.

Same with Lightroom. I still use v4 and it’s still better than anything else available today.

I try all the alternatives annually and nothing has as comprehensive and complete a toolset.

A good alternative to AE, especially for simpler stuff, is Apple Motion. It works in real time, unlike AE.

I’ve chosen it over AE for all the animated titles I’ve worked on for the past 8 or so years and have had no issues.

Opening AE to update old projects is a chore, never enjoyable. Motion is actually fun to use. I paid once, and they’ve been updating it for free since 2011.

Traditional engineers have a code of ethics and it prohibits them from misleading their clients, requires they take certain precautions to prevent unexpected harms. But it does not prevent them from making things intended to harm. They may still design bombs and warplanes, may make guns and bullets for their clients to sell, with no constraints on the final use to which they are applied.

An engineering code of ethics would require us to avoid inadvertent data leaks, but would not constrain us from developing spyware, or programs intended to steal the work of users and profit from it. For that we need a moral position from which to say that these things are wrong, and courage to refuse to do them. We will not find precedent for this in traditional engineering, which has always refused to make this stand.

We do find it in healthcare and law, where doctors and lawyers have duties to their clients that include serving only their clients, not their employers.

The equivalent in software would be that we don't gather data unless it directly serves the user, and we certainly don't let our employers sell it.

We need to take lessons from multiple professions, not just professional engineering.

That was my first thought too. I looked at the Firefly product and it seemed to say they don’t use your personal data. They have other “AI” products through like GenStudio that’s “coming soon” and I don’t see any “ethical ai” section in its description.

I bet this is a “test the waters” EULA and we’ll see them pull it back in the next few days if not hours.

If they do pull it back I wonder if they get to keep all of the content of the people who clicked yes within the time window of the onerous EULA?

Here is my sort of contrarian take looking at this as a freelance designer who pays the bills with Adobe tools.

Im happy to prosper from the work of other commercial artists while feeding the pool. I’ve used a combination of Bing Image Generator and Adobe’s tools to streamline a bunch of work flows and a lot of the pain points in my day have been smoothed over and made delightful. For me these AI tools are like an ergonomic upgrade, literally saving my eye sight.

Regarding sensitive files, I don’t have any hardcore NDA clients but I guess I’d wait for their legal team to care and carry on. Isn’t Windows itself compromised this much?

It's not for you or Adobe to assume the right to use other people's property without explicit permission. Adobe forces users to give it a blanket permission and profit from the properties that aren't even theirs. We might dispense with the rule of law at this point.

Not only for training their models on any content opened by Adobe products, but it would also cover any content generated by their models, since the models would implicitly have a licence to use the content they were trained with.

And you will get screwed a second time, because you have to pay the cancellation fee.

> Should you cancel after 14 days, you'll be charged a lump sum amount of 50% of your remaining contract obligation and your service will continue until the end of that month's billing period.

I think your theoretically have the right for a free out of bad cancellation if a provider changes their TOS in a way where it's reasonable to argue it affects the usability of the product for you. At least in the EU.

Common law countries in general as well. You're not supposed to be able to rewrite a contract arbitrarily, nor can you simply write into a contract that you can rewrite it at will. In common law, that theoretically makes it not a contract in the first place.

For that reason, if you raise the right kind of fuss and raise it to their legal team, the legal team will almost certainly let you out for free rather than run the risk of getting their contract invalidated to any degree in a court of law. I speak here generally in such countries, not just for Adobe.

However, this is theory. The rule of law is generally declining in the West. Your mileage may vary in any specific attempt.

Lawyer up! They unilaterally changed the contract, that probably invalidates that clause in any sane country (so, not USA). They might even have to pay you the cancellation fee, or more.

It may even in the us, but a lawyer will cost you more than paying the fee. Though there is a class action in the us if enough people cancle - the lawyers get the cancle fee and you get $.25

Adobe's fine print contains a Binding Arbitration Agreement and Class Action Waiver, which would prevent class action in the U.S. if you didn't follow the instructions to opt out.

Similar clauses, some without opt-outs, have proliferated widely throughout the tech industry. Most notably, Windows added them to most of their products shortly before the release of Windows 8. Interestingly, GitHub does not have these clauses yet.

Check your credit card terms of service carefully. Cards do have consumer protection, but generally it isn't about this type of situation. If you owe the fee then it is fraud to do a chargeback and you can get into legal trouble (though odds are as the other poster said: they will just send you to collections and it will hit your credit report).

I agree that this type of change to contract terms is not acceptable, but unfortunately you need a lawyer to fight it.

https://www.adobe.com/legal/terms.html

"1.5 Updates to Terms...

...We may make changes to the Terms from time to time, and if we do, we will notify you by revising the date at the top of the Terms and, in some cases, we may provide you with additional notice. Adobe will not make changes that have the effect of imposing additional fees or charges without providing additional notice. Any such changes will not apply to any dispute between you and Adobe arising prior to the date on which we posted the revised Terms incorporating such changes, or when the Terms otherwise become effective. You should look at the Terms regularly..."

"...Unless otherwise noted, the amended Terms will be effective immediately, and your continued use of our Services and Software confirm your acceptance of the changes. If you do not agree to the amended Terms, you must stop using our Services and Software and, if applicable, cancel your subscription..."

It doesn't have to be court-enforceable. It just has to be scary enough that the customer will self-enforce. Usually the worst thing that happens if you put something invalid in a contract is that it's as if you didn't write it. Which is fine because that's what you would have done anyway.

It doesn't matter, because in sane countries, even when such clauses aren't outright illegal, you still have the right to refuse the change and cancel the contract without penalty. I am not sure exactly which countries are sane.

There's all kinds of law about what you can and can't put in a contract. You can't just write whatever you want and then hold people to it. Why do you think they always have a clause that says that if part of the contract is found to be invalid, the rest still applies?

I replaced Gimp with Krita. It is often said that Krita is made for digital painting rather than photo editing but I haven't missed any features so far.

From my experience Krita didn't feel much better than GIMP. Stuff like the eraser being hidden under brushes is just weird compared to my previous experience.

If you're doing digital painting, it's probably just what you're used to.

I disliked Krita until I spent a few weeks learning it. Once I found the "Krita way" of doing things, it was actually a much better experience than Photoshop offered for digital painting.

I'd recommend finding a YouTube video where an artist takes you through how they use Krita to see some of the workflow and most common shortcuts.

It's the other way around. The widget library was built for Gimp, then took a life of its own. Note that Gimp still has not released a version ported to GTK 3 (but the port is done since last year, in the 3.0 branch), released 13 years ago. GTK 4 has been released 4 years ago.

I started using GIMP again. I used color adjustment and creating images using 5-7 layers with layer masks and not normal blending. It worked well. I always find the program not quite intuitive initially but once I get it, it’s not bad.

For sorting and basic photography edits I use Dark table. Still getting used to it.

I showed a couple of those GIMP created pieces and people seemed to like them. My theory is people look at the final image and don’t care much how you got there.

I am an sw engineer and I dread having to use gimp. the main thing gimp designers dont understand is that when I am doing 'something' I dont wanna have to come out of that context and enter another context of 'how does this f*king s/w works' and remember that for another occasional thing i'll do a month down the road. Adobe could not have paid money and made gimp worse that it is right now UX wise.

I'm a casual user, and GIMP is totally usable and powerful, but some of the UI/UX choices are a little bizarre.

For example:

* Open a document, draw a selection box to copy a piece out and then close this document: it asks you if you want to save because the selection is actually part of the document. (I understand that if you had a complicated selection you might want to preserve it, but if it's a simple rectangle I think the default should probably be to assume you don't want it.) * Pasting an image into a document: it does this weird thing where it doesn't create a layer automatically and you have to decide each time whether you want a layer or to collapse the weird pseudo-layer thing down onto the existing layer. I'd rather it just created a layer. (Maybe there's a setting for this, I haven't looked too hard.) * I find I end up fighting with the multipurpose resize/skew/rotate tool. I can't remember exactly why, but it's a little unintuitive.

Yep I’ve used it for all sorts of things like UI widgets and basic photo editing and animated gif creation. I wouldn’t know where to start with photoshop. I imagine going the other way after being a pro with photoshop for years would be jarring and make you think it’s the worst software ever created because you have muscle memory for everything in photoshop.

Just a disclaimer: I haven't ever edited for anything serious. I'd be fine with an open 'paint' from Windows

That said, I haven't noticed much change with GIMP over the years. It's... fine. The timeless one.

Other/newer editors are around though. I hear good things about Krita

According to a video I saw recently of a presentation by one of the main contributors to GIMP, it is even getting CMYK Support, a much belabored point of criticism in the past. Some significant improvements are coming.

I wanted to like Gimp, but I bought Pixelmator Pro on my Mac because I just couldn’t…

Hard to describe, it’s just clunky if you know the professional tools well. But plenty of people do use it, so your mileage may vary. I hope the rough edges are polished down over time, but not at the moment for me.

Gimp really ought to rebrand myself. I mean come on, who wants to use a program with that name? Even IMP is a hundred times better and lends itself to some impish branding assets.

for non native English speakers this often isn't an issue as the English word gimp is rarely used, so there is a good chance to more associate it with the software then the meaning behind the word.

It’s a terrible name, period. A substandard piece of software already has enough issues with marketing itself. Naming it with a word that means “cripple”, no matter how often it is used, is just such a poor decision that it’s not really surprising that no one cares about the app.

Yeah I would love for them to change the name. I always wince when talking about it to someone who doesn’t know what it is. I have fallen back to “GNU Image”with some crowds :)

Exact reason why I love Paint.NET[0]

Has all the features I need and you can install plugins, and I think that it's very intuitive. Used it to refine DALL-E pictures for my hobby-project.

I work on a MacBook and Paint.NET is windows-only. There's a Windows VM on my MacBook with one single reason for its existence, I'll let you guess what that is.

[0]https://getpaint.net/

This is also my experience as an occasional user. What I cannot explain is that even after more than two decades, no better open source alternative with a comparable range of functions has emerged. (Krita comes close, though.)

I’ve encountered plenty of things you just flat out can not do in gimp. The latest one is you can’t highlight text. Something incredibly basic that other programs have had since the 90s.

https://imgz.org/i8CEMAJq.png

Create a transparent layer. Paint on it in a colour of your choice. Set layer mode to "darken only" or "lighten only" depending on your background. "Difference" is fun too.

I've been using GIMP for longer than I care to remember and I am painfully aware of what is not great in its UI, which is something that seems to have gotten _worse_ over time. This isn't one of them; to paraphrase, that's just knowing how to use basic features that GIMP and other programs have had since the 1990s.

That’s not what I’m talking about. I wanted the same effect as you get on MS Word when you highlight text. Creating a coloured background behind the text. It’s a pretty common effect on posters and similar things.

The best you can do in gimp is fill the entire text box background, but that doesn’t look good at all on multi line text where you want it to fit each line properly.

Sound like nonsense. You can clearly select text from text layers, which is what you get when you write text on a picture. I think you are ptobably describing something else and need to be more specific about what you mean by highlighting.

You can highlight text in GIMP:

(1) Create new layer from visible.

(2) Select the text using the text tool.

(3) Set zoom to 100%.

(4) Screenshot.

(5) Paste screenshot.

(6) Floating layer to new layer.

(7) Align screenshot layer with the new-from-visible layer.

(8) Difference layer mode.

(9) If the selection did not fit on screen, duplicate the new-from-visible layer.

(10) Merge down.

(11) Select the selection box with the fuzzy select tool. (You may need to delete the regions of the merged layer that represent the GIMP UI to do this.)

(12) Select → Remove Holes.

(13) Invert selection.

(14) Delete.

(15) Invert selection.

(16) Delete.

(17) Fill (with a block colour of your choice).

(18) Hide the layer, then goto step 2 until all of the selection is accounted for.

(19) Merge all the block colour layers together.

(20) Re-order the block colour layer under the text layer.

(21) Reduce opacity to taste.

See! It's theoretically possible to assign the desired pixel values using GIMP, therefore GIMP is perfect and has no problems at all. In fact, you can automate this with a very simple combination of AutoHotKey and Script-Fu (passing control data from Script-Fu to AutoHotKey using PixelGetColor), which is practically as good as having it built-in.

(More seriously: you can probably do gimp-vectors-new-from-text-layer, segment it into glyphs, take only the glyphs within a selection, split those into lines, find bounding boxes for those lines, and fill them with the current foreground colour, but there appears to be no way to query the current text selection from Script-Fu, so you'd have to use this with the Lasso selection tool or something.)

> I'm an occasional user and there's nothing I can do in under ten minutes of futzing or seeking tutorials.

This is true of occasional users of Photoshop, too. If you don't know how to use Photoshop, its UI is an atrocity.

Right -- you have to know something that people don't ever tell you:

Photoshop is a medium as much as it is an application.

As a medium it has fundamentals, and once you know those fundamentals, you're not really chained to Photoshop.

In my experience it's the occasional users of Photoshop who have the most trouble switching to anything else, because for them it is still icons and buttons and sliders and menu items they expect in certain places.

If you've spent enough time with Photoshop and learned what is really happening, what blend modes are, how layers work deeply, switching is easier because it's much easier to recognise those same principles elsewhere.

This, I think, is why Adobe has the predatorily priced Photoshop plan and is unwilling to put true power into Photoshop Elements (which was last a "cut down Photoshop" back at version 3.0 or so).

They know that the underlying skills are portable.

This might be a pretty big idea. Since GIMP is highly scriptable afaik it should be possible to have an AI do all the work. But as always... you would need a lot of training data.

Yes thanks, that's a great point. I haven't had good luck with Krita personally, but I also haven't put hardly any time into it. I've heard very good things about it so I really need to give it some dedicated time.

They serve different workloads. Other than GIMP Affinity is also a great alternative, not FOSS, but buy it for life with an incredible price that includes feature updates.

It’s unclear to me if this policy applies only to files that you’re hosting with their cloud service - in which case I think (?) the scanning of those files is no different from any other cloud file hosting service, which I assume also scan files to make sure you aren’t hosting something egregiously illegal.

Of course, this problem doesn’t exist at all if you just sell offline desktop software, but alas, the monthly SAAS business model has eaten everything else.

IALAL, but the content from the Adobe clarification posted earlier tells it applies to all files created with their software, regardless of whether you host them in the cloud or on your own computer.

Part of this, I think, is the bleed-in of cloud services even to work stored entirely offline: their AI-enhanced tools send content out to the cloud.

For example you likely cannot implement content-aware fill in the cloud without sending the content to the cloud.

I really really like Affinity. I'm not a pro but they offer all of the tools I would possibly need in a much better designed package compared to open source alternatives like gimp. Adobe has more bells and whistles like AI, but I don't need that. And I'm very happy to support their no-subscription model, it's very refreshing.

Not close. They’re utterly inconsistent and glitchy which makes using them in a hurry a total nightmare. The corel stuff was better.

Adobe have successfully built a moat around particularly Photoshop that no one seems likely to get close to crossing.

Counter-opinion.... I use both the Adobe suite and afinity. I love affinity for the interoperability of it's apps (which has to be experiencd to belive) and it's comprehensive support of RAW.

At home I use mostly Affinity, at work it's Adobe all the way.

Photoshop is unique for the many professions it supports: web designers, graphic designers, photographers, digital painters etc. If you are looking for a PS replacement, first ask what you are going to use it for. Other apps may be the more natural choice.

God is in the detail. I would hesitate to use Affinity photo for digital painting simply because there is no slick way to change the flow rate of brushes. Recent changes have improved this, but not to the point where it is comfortable to use.

I used Affinity Photo in my generative art; I also own Photoshop and use it for a few things, but it's rare. AP is faster at many things that matter to me, the UI is much cleaner, and it suits me just fine despite occasional issues (mostly memory related, their memory management sucks). Many of Photoshop's AI "features" are useless to me since they can only do tiny images (basically the usual 1MP that AI can manage). PS is a giant pile of features, but the UI is often a giant pile of complexity because of it.

I use Affinity Photo and Designer professionally and at home.

Affinity Photo is not Photoshop. That said, it's a great image editor in and of itself. Making direct comparisons I feel is unfair, yes it is glitchy and can, and does, have inconsistent UI behaviour though is only occasional in my experience.

But for US$70 per major version, perpetual (no subscription), for the small team behind it, compared to the Adobe behemoth behind Photoshop, it's pretty damn good.

As of writing (2024-06-08), Serif's entire suite is 50% off at the moment, which makes Affinity Photo US$35 perpetual, for (in my opinion) 80% of Photoshop's capabilities, when Photoshop itself is US$22.99 per month (individual subscription).

Designer blows Inkscape out of the water. Yes, I know I'm comparing a commercial package to an open source package, though for professionals who don't have time to troubleshoot bugs in open source software, let alone time to write their own patches, Inkscape sadly doesn't cut it here.

For what its worth, I am a huge advocate of open source software, though I'm also a professional that needs my tools to work now, not in six months when someone gets around to helping/assisting/writing a patch.

Downsides for Designer though, it does lack some features, like image tracing, though it's not a deal breaker for US$70 perpetual, for a user interface that's intuitive (sorry Inkscape), and that spits out SVG images that don't cause problems in other consuming applications, or SVGs that fail to display correctly.

Coincidentally I do use Inkscape for image tracing though migrate over to Designer after that.

As much as it sucks, the only way Serif will get close to knocking Photoshop, or Illustrator, or InDesign, off the 'industry-standard' pedestal is if we all support them by kicking in a few dollars for a licence, even the cheaper iOS tools, which are more-or-less on-par with their desktop counterparts.

Likewise for open-source software: they'd easily start winning over people with a better UI design (again, in my opinion, most FOSS software in this space feels unpolished) and perhaps commercial sponsorship like Blender has been able to partner.

Before version 3.0, Blender's UI sucked and drove a lot of people away. It's now easy and intuitive, if overwhelming with the number of features it has, attracting a lot of newbies and kids wanting to learn 3D.

Blender (there are some really big names here!) - https://fund.blender.org/

Inkscape - https://inkscape.org/*sponsors/

GIMP (Web Archive as GIMP's website is having cache issues right now) - https://web.archive.org/web/20240603082716/https://www.gimp....

(I have no financial interest in Serif at all, apart from owning licences for their software.)

I agree with all of this, though I think it's a little unfair to the achievements of Inkscape, which is in its own way an utterly remarkable project and could one day be the only vector graphics package that we have that really runs on our own machines without limitations. (Not to mention that it is apparently keeping a handful of ancient, reliable vinyl cutters supported long after the death of their bespoke software.)

I (a non-designer web engineer who has absorbed some skills in thirty years of hanging around a world class designer) really like Designer and would never buy Illustrator, but I really admire Inkscape.

Just as a side-note because I enjoy recommending a weird app every now and then, have you ever played with NeverCenter's CameraBag?

It looks, on the surface, like a cheap toy app. But appearances are deceptive. The filter chain tool is wildly impressive, and some of the colour curve tools are unique, getting you almost towards LUT creator tools in terms of their power.

It's not something you'll use every day but it's very interesting for visualisation, and it makes some things so easy for newbies it's worth knowing how it works just so you have a tool to recommend.

(people get annoyed when I share my full views on the way GIMP is an oft-recommended open source "alternative" app, so I won't)

I work a lot in Premiere / After Effects / Photoshop. For me it would be incredible difficult and time consuming to change my workflow. Wouldn’t be impossible, but I would need to spend lot of time learning new tools until I would get to the same work speed. Plus it would be much more expensive. Am I concerned regarding this claim? Not really. I think the chances of being hacked are higher then Adobe doing something nasty with any of the projects they might have access to.

Hacked ? They are saying they can access your content (I’m assuming cloud though won’t be surprised if they also have remote access enabled by default) can be accessed by them anytime they want. Yes adobe can access the next pixar film being made when they desire to take a peek.

I am sure when you work on projects for Pixar, they are more strict regarding this kind of things, but I am not in that position, so why to worry?

Your next employer might be an informed one and require you to use different tooling. Your employer might find some info or data has leaked and trace it back to you. Either thei are informed about this Adobe stuff or perhaps they will claim you violated your NDA. All kinds of bad scenarios can spring up from this.

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

—Martin Niemöller

consider the chances of you getting sued by your clients that you have signed an NDA with. the only realistic option is to seek an amendment to the agreement.

At this point, if you are in the graphic design area, Adobe basically own you. There is really nothing that will substitute for Photoshop without a massive drop in productivity.

GIMP is better that it was, but not yet good enough to replace Photoshop in the same way that Blender replaces Maya etc; perhaps this will drive support for GIMP to get better, but I'm not optimistic.

Affinity make a pretty decent clone of the main Adobe apps.

Although they just got bought by Canva so may be at the shark-jumping point.

Every time someone brings up alternatives, I always recommend Krita.

User friendly, cross platform, OSS. Far better than Gimp, especially in the UI side.

If krita work for you, that's great.

However, Photoshop do lots more than painting and photo editing. If you use the vector, content filling or plug-in features on Photoshop, krita won't help you.

Honestly a lot of creatives have managed to move away from Adobe. It's why they tried to buy Figma. And they'll try to buy probably every other alternative they can if it keeps you in their system.

Can someone please help me find some direction, I thought that adobe vindicated on this... if the claim still holds, it's pretty damning.. hell, if their generative ai wasn't so good they'd be obsolotere.. that said, they abused trust to be able to train models but no one seems to care...

Sounds like great motivation for someone to write some software that auto generates junk images, or even better, terrifying and horrific images, that then get uploaded to Adobe, in order to taint their data.

I wonder why people suck things like Cloud, Co-Pilot or Adobe, WhatsApp or Windows?

Let me guess. It seemed once convenient. This is the root of all evil. Don’t use it because it was pre-installed (Windows). Don’t keep using it because it was good before the Cloud (Photoshop). Don’t use it because others force you (WhatsApp). Literally all quick and convenient decisions are something we will regret. If you don’t like Gimp, Blender, Krita or Linux you need help to improve it.

Look at the dumpster fire Azure. Nobodies data shall be stored there: https://www.zerodayinitiative.com/advisories/ZDI-24-581/

If the Chinese government isn’t right now reading your E-Mails somebody else does. Literally everything in Azure or any other Cloud must be considered compromised. And between the security issues the rise the prices.

> Don’t use it because others force you (WhatsApp).

That's probably the worst example you could provide. The only utility of WhatsApp is because others use it. If you want to communicate with those others, that's your one and only option. You might have luck convincing some of your social contacts to move to a different chat tool, maybe, but there's around zero chance you'll be able to convince all of them.

That is why it is good advice. You inform other people about what WA is and does and ask them to use other tools and you do your part in fighting the network effect. If everyone did that, we would get rid of lots and lots of bad products.

The advice is good, if you are steadfast enough or in a situation, where you can make the change. Many more people are than think themselves they are. They need to realize it though. They need to become informed citizen and informed about alternatives.

I was able to convince all of my friends and family to use Signal so that they can chat with me, the rest just uses SMS, Telegram, Threema or something else to communicate with me...haven't had WhatsApp since 2021.

Mostly Signal here :)

SMS works fine and E-Mail is instant thanks to Push-Mail. Nearly no force on, others. Both standards. If they tell you the will cut the contact with you if they cannot force WhatsApp on you…that tells something about your relationship. Real friends would send letters if asked so. Right? Some would even visit you.

I think WhatsApp is a example because it shows the power of (uninformed) masses. Thanks to software incompatibility it spread everywhere and force the others to use it. Same for software which runs only on Windows, it is the incompatibility of Windows, which uses the power of masses (applications without a port) as lever.

The title of this piece recommends cancelling Adobe. If anybody has, what are they cancelling to? Our organization uses their audio tools among other things, and they're used to the polish and convenience they get from Adobe products.

> Our organization uses their audio tools among other things, and they're used to the polish and convenience they get from Adobe products.

As a professional in audio with over a decade of experience... Adobe has ** audio tools. There are a lot of other tools that are significantly better, commercial ones, much older than Adobe's...

Now for what Adobe is actually good at, which is not video nor audio, I'm not sure there is an alternative. I've heard things about Affinity but cannot tell you since all the people I know in graphics use Photoshop, illustrator, lightroom.

It disappeared because people disagree on whether to upvote or downvote comments, or other similar signals of disagreement.

When the HN algorithm sees signals like comments receiving large numbers of upvotes and downvotes simultaneously, or long strings of rapid back-and-forth tit-for-tat comments between posters, or etc, it interprets those signals as "this post is controversial." HN explicitly and intentionally downranks algorithmically identified controversial topics in order to reduce the odds commenters behave badly (which is disproportionately more likely in controversial topics).

The HN algorithm is intentional about a primary goal of driving well behaved discussions, even knowing that means important controversial topics getting downranked.

The fact that the disagreement here is likely centered around whether gimp is good or bad is irrelevant to the algorithm. It doesn't want people to get in the habit of behaving badly on HN, regardless of the topic.

I don’t use Adobe, but this feels like it’s missing some context around when / how the private data is accessed. Is it for AI? To satisfy law enforcement requests? For compression or some technical need?

To make the most charitable case for Adobe, this could just be clarifying that there is no encryption at rest.

It’s not clear if “may” means that the user is giving them permission when they agree to the T&C, or if there are other circumstances where they “may” be required to access the data.

Uncharitable cases would be for AI training, life-ruining tech like automated scanning for illegal content that gets automatically forwarded to authorities, etc.

It's from their general terms. It does not clearly restrict itself to items stored on their servers.

See...

2.2 Our Access to Your Content.

4.1 Content. “Content” means any text, information, communication, or material, such as audio files, video files, electronic documents, or images, that you upload, import into, embed for use by, or create using the Services and Software.

4.2 Licenses to Your Content. Solely for the purposes of operating or improving the Services and Software, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free sublicensable, license, to use, reproduce, publicly display, distribute, modify, create derivative works based on, publicly perform, and translate the Content.

...and so forth

https://www.adobe.com/legal/terms.html

They're unlikely to actually want to go out of business or spark major revisions to law, so they'll presumably "clarify". (As they've attempted to do I guess.)

I cannot believe the costly legal and compliance departments approve all of this. It seems more stupidity and not right due diligence, it is something that should concern stockholders as well.

I once had a startup that did image processing in the cloud.

Our lawyers recommended changing the TOS to allow us to use the imagery.

I strenuously disagreed, and tried to get them to explain their rationale for such a change. They never really provided a convincing answer.

(Literally, they argued that the company may someday accidentally use unlicensed imagery, and we want to protect ourselves from that liability. I suggested that the better policy should simply be more careful with our customer's data.)

How do they approve the Windows's "we can upload any data from your computer at any time" terms?

Corporation legal departments have been neglecting their jobs for a while now.

It's at their privacy policy for Win8 and 10. At the context, it's natural to assume they meant to talk about error reporting, but this is not stated anywhere. And it's been there for a while, and they never clarified this point...

Didn't we as an industry collectively shrug at closed source code (which could be doing anything with our client's data).

Then we shrugged again when we took all our client's data off-prem and onto the cloud.

Then GDPR hit some of us, so we just sorta declared the cloud-providers to be GDPR-compliant and called it a day.

What's gonna be different about this (justifiable) outrage?

Not really a choice. 99% of people in this position are going to hit Accept, because they have no choice, and their clients aren't going to complain, because they want work done in Adobe format and have no real alternative.

This is going to continue until either there's a big copyright slapfight (you can't just copy Disney stuff and expect not to get sued), HIPAA, or DPA intervention.

The AI generation of software seems to be turning into the largest erosion of privacy ever.

It's all fun and games until a malevolent political party decides it wants access to your Windows and Photoshop history.

Would it be legal to just “clone” Photoshop or Lightroom as a FOSS project?

I mean create a nearly exact clone. Everything down to the layout, tools, menus, options, etc.

Who would Adobe sue? Could they make it illegal to distribute?

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