The Great Adobe Purge of ’19 | Hacker News Reader

The Great Adobe Purge of ’19

dazwallace.wordpress.com

77 pointsarthurfm24 comments

I remember people expressing concerns about this exact scenario back when Oracle bought Sun.

Reminds me of a James Gosling quote: "during the integration meetings between Sun and Oracle, where we were being grilled about the patent situation between Sun and Google, we could see the Oracle lawyer's eyes sparkle"

Hearing about the antics of Oracle always makes me think of a certain comic[1]

[1]http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TYqlwLYCeP4/TyAIYd3-VLI/AAAAAAAACb...

I understand the desire to not support older versions, but why just marking/advertising them as `not supported`, insecure isn't enough. Is this Adobe being unnecessarily aggressive or is there some other reason?

Looks like a 3rd party licensing reason. Meaning, older versions of those apps may include some component for which Adobe no longer has a license.

Or it has turned out to infringe a patent, or turned out the party they licensed it from wasn’t the real owner.

I am holding on to my copy of Adobe Creative Suite 6 until I die.

I'm expecting my Mac copy to stop working in 10.15 and I'm quite concerned about it.

It isn’t a perfect solution, but the license agreement for Mojave (https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOS1014.pdf) allows you to:

”install, use and run up to two (2) additional copies or instances of the Apple Software within virtual operating system environments on each Mac Computer you own or control that is already running the Apple Software, for purposes of: (a) software development; (b) testing during software development; (c) using macOS Server; or (d) personal, non-commercial use.”

I may go that route, but none of the virtualization solutions are particularly performant for macOS guests. I think I'd rather reboot into a Mojave partition, if it comes to that.

I know a large number of people who maintain older Macs and PC specifically to run older versions of Adobe Photoshop and Premiere. This is going to hurt the freelance video editors very hard.

By ‘older’ do you mean pre-Creative Cloud?

If so, I can't imagine what Adobe could actually do to stop them? I figure the idle legal threats seen so far (I know of two people who claim to have received emails from Adobe - I'm awaiting one myself, as I still run 2014 Photoshop on this machine) is simply so they have a platform from which to deny access to older versions as provided through CC.

Anything installed from disc is beyond their practical reach.

I'm really curious to know what's underlying this - if it is a third party reason, I'm kind of flumoxed at Adobe's stance towards its presumably quite loyal userbase!

I want photoshop about once a year and I am literally still using photoshop 6 on windows. It's over 20 years old. Works fine, installs in about 5 seconds.

I'd happily use my disc versions of CS2 Illy and PS as they have all the tools I need, but unfortunately I need to maintain compatability with client files so I have a CC subscription.

Frankly, I hated paying as much as I did for Illy and PS here in the UK, which compared to about the same cost as the full suite in the States, but I complained sometime in the last year and now have the full suite for a mere 30p more than I was previously paying.

I still dislike their subscription model, but it now leaves a bit less of a sour taste.

Does anybody know the oldest version of Photoshop you can buy and not license? Can you still buy the software second hand?

What you are purchasing is a license, which may (and almost certainly does) have limitations. One such limitation could be time (commonly done for product trials, but not limited to such).

One could ALSO, assuming the owners wanted to sell it, buy PhotoShop but it would likely be millions of dollars and there would probably be a more economical solution to whatever problem you are trying to solve.

You're conflating buying a copy with buying a license. The two are not the same - e.g. you can buy a copy of a book, without buying the copyright itself. The book is then yours, not 'licensed'. That you don't have the right to make further copies is a different matter.

Books and software differ.

https://www.justice.gov/jm/criminal-resource-manual-1854-cop...

According to that very same link, they do not. You probably mean this passage:

> Most computer software is distributed through the use of licensing agreements. Under this distribution system, the copyright holder remains the "owner" of all distributed copies.

But this is not a difference in how copyright works for software - it's just the description of the practice of contracts of adhesion. One could 'license' a book the same way, or not include these agreements with software.

Do you believe that statement contradicts or supports my claim (below) ?

> What you are purchasing is a license, which may (and almost certainly does) have limitations. One such limitation could be time (commonly done for product trials, but not limited to such).

My assertion is that what you are purchasing in the Adobe Software case is a license, what you are purchasing in your hypothetical book case is not. It is something else, it is different.

Yes, it's different in the Adobe Software case, because they chose to attach a license to it. They could have just as well sold, not licensed, individual copies, the same way that books are sold.

Books and software don't differ intrinsically - the business practices of software vendors differ from those of book vendors.

What bothers me is the pretense that the only possibilities are licensing software, with all of the zero rights that usually entails, or buying the entire copyright to the software, for, as you said, millions of dollars. It borders on a lie of omission - it's perfectly possible to sell copies of software - vendors just choose not to.

So are we now both in agreement that my original statement (below) is factually correct ?

> What you are purchasing is a license, which may (and almost certainly does) have limitations. One such limitation could be time (commonly done for product trials, but not limited to such).

> One could ALSO, assuming the owners wanted to sell it, buy PhotoShop but it would likely be millions of dollars and there would probably be a more economical solution to whatever problem you are trying to solve.

And we are _only_ in disagreement that the situation warranted listing additional purchasing options, in context ?

Agreed.

Aren't you buying a license to copy the software compared to buying a license for the subscription to the software, in this Adobe scenario?

You can buy second hand copies from ebay, although most of them are for Mac and/or have ridiculous prices considering their age.

In terms of running them, i have Photoshop LE (a trimmed down of photoshop) from 1995 running on Windows 10, it works although it was a bit tricky to install it because the installer is 16bit (i used https://github.com/otya128/winevdm which adds emulated 16bit executable support to 64bit windows, but even then the installer failed to register something. However the files were copied fine and i just grabbed them and copied them to another folder as the original was getting deleted by the installer after the failure).

I guess later versions will be easier to make work (and frankly, chances are these very old versions are most likely already far surpassed by Krita, which has a similar UI).

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