I read an article recently that claimed one day we will subscribe to our cars. Or rather, A car. When you need it you will call it up on an app and it will arrive at your door at the appointed hour. When you are finished with it, it will go off to serve another client. I'm not interested, but then I don't live in a city.

I "own" two network environments in my office that are most definitely offline.

(pay for, not run as an admin so I don't really know the real problems)

It just sunk in to many of us today that premiere was going cloud - or at least it was getting booted from our networks. It's what we use to prepare/manage our videos of various interesting things that we do. We don't have real video people - just the PIs/engineers/program managers that have access. Many of us could do premiere. Now what?

I have a fountain pen. Perhaps I'll just gracefully write a description of that $Million+ experiment's results...

Either stick with the CS6 version or earlier. Or, you can go with Premiere Elements for a lot less $$ if you don't need the (few) features that the Pro version gives you.

Also, AFAIK: The newer Creative Cloud (CC) versions of everything still install/run/save locally. It just phones home every 30 days or so to make sure your account is still active/paid.
So, not much of a departure function-wise. It's just the "subscription-based" model I have an issue with. YMMV...

Accept the subscription fee as the "cost of doing business"

Find a single-payment replacement, or a Free software replacement. While not Free software, Lightworks is at least free and can run on all 3 OS platforms - https://www.lwks.com/

I'll direct our networks' change control boards to lwks. They're pretty uptight, but maybe that's a solution.

For home use, I saw the cloud looming and "bought" a standalone photoshop a year or so ago. It's strange that I was ok with one multi-hundred$ purchase yet not a smaller monthly "rental".

Old software is OK for my box at home - but we have to stay current with the latest security patches at work...

The one thing I will give it props for is portability.

You are allowed two concurrent activation's per license so technically it's a two seat license if you choose to use it that way.

You can install on more than two machines and just switch activation as needed.

Typically I'll have two activations on my office machines and when I travel just deactivate one office machine and activate one of my laptops.

I have long despised adobe.

Also wholly agree on the 'rent' model. The tech industry has us by the balls and they are LOVING it!

Been that way for a long time now.

Even before the subscription model took off we never really owned our software.

All we really had was a conditional license to use the software and the "conditions" always favored the developer.

Same way with music.

Buy a CD, you own the physical disc but not the content.

Except for those pinko commie Free Software licenses, like the GPL which guarantees the end users' access to the source code so that they can fix issues, make changes, etc.

Some Free licenses like the BSD license do favor the dev more than the end user - with the BSD license, a dev can choose whether or not to release source.

https://opensource.org/osd

https://www.fsf.org/


Remember, Free as in speech, not free as in beer.

The topic is subscription licenses.

My comments are confined to commercial offerings.

The issue with this subscription that the major software companies will soon face...Open source software can typically do 98% of the fancy name brand for free. Software and OSes have become fairly similar.
My parents had issues with Windows. They kept clicking on this that they were warned not to. I had two options, create a windows profile with limited rights (and get phone calls when they inevitably do something), or go with Ubuntu.
They have no idea that they are not on a Windows machine. They are able to do the same thing as before. My mom writes so she uses the OpenOffice version of word. (which is compatible with the M$ version). They tend to use the browser the most. I have Firefox and Chrome and they are set.
I think the subscription model will eventually start to irritate enough people that the software companies will modify. Maybe offer the software for free / low cost but without support. If you need support a charge basis could be offered. (per call, or month, or year).

Another issue I see is the use of software without internet access. If my wife goes to a craft fair and does not have internet what can she do?

The biggest issue I see is privacy. If I am developing picture using Adobe, or my wife is making a project then they have access to our private moments or creations. I am shocked when I see people adding Amazon Echo's or Xbox video controls....We are giving ourselves away! And we don't own anything, this license is to use, but not ours.

I am sure everyone has heard about the Porsche subscription model. After seeing it succeed, BMW has decided to join the game. This is worse than leasing! It will succeed however, look at cell phones, people want the newest one so often that the carriers offer plans to exchange them yearly.

If you have a nice old air cooled Porsche, go out and hug it. You own it! There is no software that isn't yours, or data that's being recorded. Leave the cell phone at home and go for a nice subscription free ride without distractions...

A Cricut was donated to us but we are unable to use it since it requires an old version of Adobe DC and we cannot have unpatched software here. I offered to put the old version on a machine disconnected from the network but it requires an internet connection to phone home. We are buying a Silhouette instead. No cloud connection required and if you do connect to the cloud there are free designs every month.

In the end, Adobe Photoshop is the "standard" all other photo editing programs are measured against. I have been using it since it was called PhotoStyler and Adobe bought that and rolled it into Photoshop. Back in the floppy disk days.

We buy the annual license and always have the up to date software. We can't possibly care less about the Creative Cloud and cloud storage. We work with simply gigantic files and even Photoshop can't handle them in full, we have to cut them up into pieces to edit them. Our mapping software can spit out a 14 GB tiff file and other mapping software programs work with the files easily. Photoshop limits the files to 2GB unless we go to the PSB format, but none of the mapping software uses that format. Grrr.

Just bought a new version of Parallels, wanted me to do $80/year with updates or $100 one-time payment, no updates. Since I only need it to run Win7 and QuickBooks, the latter was the easy choice.

What can be done about this subscription paradigm? Seems like software companies have us by the balls.

If you need to run Win7 + Quickbooks use VirtualBox instead of Parallels. Same result (VM with Win7) but Vbox is both Free and free.

thanks Steve but too late. Bought a new version of || and downloading Win10 which from a quick google search seems to be a decent OS. My last new computer was over 7 years ago and I tend to go all out when setting a new on up.

I just hate the subscription model.

QuickBooks is a great program. After 3 years it will no longer download a bank feed and your accountant may not be able to open the file. We just upgrade it every three years. I bet real soon they will go tot the subscription mode like Adobe and Microsoft.

They already have. You can buy the desktop still but they have 3 sub models.

I just installed QB15 on the Win10 that Parallels gives you and it works fine. For now. I am sure they will stop supporting it soon which is fine, I worry they will do something that will make you update.

They really push the on-line version. I will never go that route. Once you change to the on-line version you can never get your data back down to your computer. I prefer the desktop version. If they drop it and go to online only I will find a new bookkeeping program.

Linux is OK but I think schroeder is cool.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1522954344.jpg

Ha! i crack me up.
Sorry.