Comment by lucb1e | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lucb1e | Hacker News Reader

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I think it's an excellent excuse to try to get people to stop making implicit product recommendations and reinforcing a de facto standard (monpoly?) when they are really just trying to say "photo editing".

Adobe's Creative Suite is a little pet peeve of mine. Many people I know have it illegally (I'm a student, so that says something about the financial capabilities of my peers), and even if they can afford it they say they don't use it professionally or not enough to warrant buying it. Many are even software developers themselves. Some subjects in the study I do even require using Adobe Photoshop specifically, but kindly ask people to buy it rather than supplying a license "because it's too expensive to provide for everyone". (So they think the students can afford it then? I'm quite certain they're just covertly asking us to violate copyright laws here.) If it's all so terribly expensive and apparently we can't negotiate with this overlord, why don't we try to get rid of this industry standard?

I don't think it's terribly expensive if you're a creative professional when you consider the Creative Cloud subscription model. The main reason it has become the standard is because it's so great.

I'm not sure what you mean by "apparently we can't negotiate." There are bulk licensing deals and student discounts. If you're a student, you can get Photoshop and Lightroom for $10/mo. If someone needs it for one course, that's seems pretty affordable.

Also Dutch students doing only semi-related studies? Last time I looked into it, it was a few hundred bucks at least, and more if you used it commercially.

Yes, any Dutch student can get a full Creative Cloud subscription for €19,66/month. That's for the whole suite, I assume you can cherry pick only Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign for a fair bit less. You need either an education related e-mail address, which I didn't have when I went to college (The Netherlands doesn't have something like an .edu.nl extension), but a scan of a university card seems to be valid as well if you read the fine print.

https://creative.adobe.com/nl/plans?plan=edu&store_code=nl

Okay thanks, that's a good argument to use next time I hear someone has it illegally.

$10/mo is the standard price for everyone, not students

Net on the list: Google is not a verb.

$29 per month for the student subscription which includes access to ALL creative cloud products? That isn't expensive at all especially in the context of higher education where a single textbook can cost over $100.

Actually, it's only $20/mo. Or $10/mo if you only want Photoshop/Lightroom.

When I was in college, I bought used books and sold them online as soon as the course was over (unless there was good reason to think I'd use the book again). $29/month is a lot to spend unless you have the time and preexisting skills to use them to make that money back.

I think daily income of an undergraduate level engineer in countries like India is in the 10-15$/day range. It's substantially lower in some African countries. It's pretty strange that the software industry seems incapable of offering software priced by country. Both have marginal reproduction costs. I'd of course recommend using FLOSS software but it's a self feeding vicious circle of "no Photoshop skills no job for you...lol Gimp". I'm pretty sure software "piracy" is gladly accepted in low income countries as long as the corporate/government licenses are bought. That was very much true for Microsoft licenses when I was in Africa. Administrator basically meant Windows-Administrator which was mind boggling since TCO should be in favor of Linux and the like in low income countries but if there's only a tiny pool of admins the TCO rises compared to Windows (due to accepted "piracy"). I thought it was a very interesting (and sad) phenomenon.

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