Yeah nope, if the same product is available for free then the only way to prove a “stolen sale” is if someone had previously paid for the subscription and then cancelled to use the free version of the same product.

Anything else is just the hand of the free market doing it’s thing. If Adobe executives are malding because someone made a cheaper (or free) alternative then they have two honourable routes available:

1. Add more value to their products to convince people their price tag is worth it.

2. Reduce the price they charge.

But they’ll literally do anything else but those two, including astroturfing messages like “open source software is piracy”, so stop spewing corpo bullshit!

Adobe pretty much encouraged piracy up until about a decade ago, that way they got schools to train (for free) potential future customers in their way to use design software.

TBH I don’t understand why they have gone with the subs model they currently have, its kind of cutting the blood line from their future customers.

Competition is always a good thing, FOSS competition is the best thing in my opinion.

This guy is a hero, but not because he is trying to fuck Adobe but rather he is helping free design software from (massive) cost which most people cannot afford.

More designers, better art to my mind.

I guarantee that Adobe definitely sees every download of GIMP as a lost sale. That’s corporate mentality.

I worked for many years in the music business, starting back in the days of the “Home Taping is killing music” campaign. I know for a fact that music executives saw the sale of every blank tape, and later, every download, as a lost sale. You could explain that it wasn’t really a lost sale, because that consumer probably wouldn’t have bought it anyway, but they didn’t like hearing that. If someone was listening to it, even if it was just curiosity, that was a lost sale.

They didn’t feel that way about radio stations or libraries, two places where people could get music for free, but somehow, borrowing a friend’s album, and taping it so you could listen to it a few times and decide if you wanted to buy a clean copy, infuriated them.

I knew the people at the top who were going after the downloaders. They were mean, nasty, greedy people, who were stealing way more from their own artists than consumers were ever stealing from them, so I never had a single concern about downloading whatever I want.

These days, artists hardly make any money from recordings. Unless you are buying the music direct from the artist at their shows, then you are just feeding an evil record company. Pirate the records, pay for the shows and merch, and if you want to own a physical copy, buy your music direct from the artist.

Do that long enough, and record companies will die.

And Inkscape, fuck Adobe :)

Last year Blender got a shout out at the Oscars from the makers of Flow.

I used to steal profit from Safeway all the time! I should have put those tips intended for me as an individual donations to the corporation in the till as was policy. So naive and selfish.

Affinity is free now, it’s pretty good. I don’t know how long that will last though.

Yeah, Adobe is just mud

Maybe you mean a more “brush and canvas” interface without complexity and distraction. I’m an artist that uses gimp. They are both great, Krita is just made with ease of use and emulation of irl tools in mind. GIMP can do emulation stuff too, but it can also do tons of other things, even video fx and animation.

But it does take money away in other ways. I use GIMP for work which could easily pay for Adobe if I asked them. We just don’t need to since we aren’t doing any high-demand tasks.

My gramma totally screwed Intel. She never used a computer in her entire life.

Personally, I can recommend a VM for that reason. Activate it once and then just copy the VM over to a new PC, Backup location, etc. Turn on internet access for it when activating, turn it off and leave it disabled for the rest of your life. Worked like a charm for me.

Yep, same here. Mojave on an old MacBook with a complete CS5 suite lets me continue to use what I paid for.

I didn’t have a still-running copy like you did, so instead I disabled all network access and used my existing install media/licensing to activate offline, then before restoring network I went through and blocked every single executable at the firewall, esp anything having to do with updates or the licensing module. Now it doesn’t matter whether there is internet access or not, everything is stable and it doesn’t phone home.

The blocking was a pain in the ass, no lie, but I can restore the firewall settings from time machine if ever needed, and meanwhile I have a working, unshittified CS5 that is not constantly trying to move my data up to the cloud or give itself legal rights to my IP. It’s lacking some newer features probably, but it does what I need.

I’m going to pass your instructions along to a friend still using CS5 on the same Mac he installed it on, though. It’s a great strategy.

I’m still using cs3 as well. For what it’s worth, I just checked and it’s still out there to be had. I have the master suite, which I could not find, but pscs3 itself is still alive out there.

Are you sure you’re using gimp and not a VCR?

Software licensing will eventually be relegated to the “dustbin of history”, hopefully it won’t be after humanity emerges from a post-apocalyptic hellscape.