Adobe doesn't really have a choice here. They're doing this to comply with sanctions, not because they have any dog in fighting Maduro.
If Venezuelans pirate Photoshop, then Adobe can go and say "hey, these people are using it without our permission, which means we're still in compliance".
"Failure" in this case is legal, not technical (distinction without a difference to users).
Oh, how so? You think that it pays for them to fight and defy a government order?
Designing a fail-safe system involves acknowledging that you may not know why the system may fail, just that something must be done to mitigate the problem if it does. International sanctions proved to be such an unexpected point of failure.
You might be proposing a bigger rebellion against capitalism than just illegally selling to Venezuela :)
For quite a few things, Adobe products are just irreplaceable.
Until people learn to face some inconvenience and limitations they'll just keep being abused by these companies. Changing the world requires some personal pain.
As an Aussie, I look at these international companies as that: international. Should I now start considering all forms of non Aussie software /tech a matter of potential infiltration?
I hope Adobe understand they are now complicit in an international fracas, where there's a lot of innocent people in Venezuela likely feeling an immediate financial crush, simply because the software they were using stopped. They can't work now. No money means they can't feed their kids.
They will blame Adobe for this, and not some executive order.
What about the day when some US order outlaws my country? This is a very sad day for international tech.
Yes! And if they were truly internatonal as you thought they were, it would be even worse, because they would be immune from any legal action. Corporations acting as if they were sovereign powers would be even worse than they are today.
> there's a lot of innocent people in Venezuela likely feeling an immediate financial crush, simply because the software they were using stopped. They can't work now. No money means they can't feed their kids.
That's, unfortunately, the whole point of sanctions. They work by inflicting enough civilian damage to get people to bully their own government into submitting to the will of party issuing the sanction.
> What about the day when some US order outlaws my country? This is a very sad day for international tech.
Most of your SaaSes you depend on will stop working. This is a reminder why SaaS as practiced today is a bad idea.
Considering the converse is already true, why not?
What do you mean by "the converse"?
'US company' is to the rest of the world becoming a liability in many ways fast.
List of the countries under consequential US sanctions attention and their systems of government:
Russia: dictatorship. Cuba: dictatorship. Iran: theocratic dictatorship. Venezuela: dictatorship. North Korea: dictatorship. Syria: dictatorship. Sudan: recently a military junta.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_sanctions
I too hope Australia is never like those countries. The countries that the US targets sanctions on, no coincidence, are always near the bottom of the Democracy Index (and typically very high on corruption rankings).
Short list of liberal democracies that have zero fear of falling under comparable US sanctions today:
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Ireland, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Iceland, Israel, Slovakia, Czechia, Slovenia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and so on.
The reason why so many powerful, influential, affluent, liberal nations cooperate with the US so frequently on sanctions - and have for much of the post WW2 era - is because they know they are under zero threat from the US sanctioning them and they also know the US has exclusively targeted sanctions at non-democratic, extremely high-corruption nations.
It's really simple in fact, here's the Democracy Index. On average the higher countries rank, the less they ever need to be concerned about US sanctions being directed at them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index
Some of the countries near the bottom of that democracy list: Iran, Syria, Sudan, North Korea, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela.
> Russia: dictatorship. Cuba: dictatorship. Iran: theocratic dictatorship. Venezuela: dictatorship. North Korea: dictatorship. Syria: dictatorship. Sudan: recently a military junta.
I read it as: Russia: enemy ex-superpower, second biggest net oil exporter. Cuba: stole our oil refineries half a century ago, we're still mad about it. Iran: in top 10 of net oil exporters (also, tried to take them over and fucked up). Venezuela: top ten of net oil exporters. North Korea: old enemy, though also universally considered evil. Syria: US wants to force a government change and supports the rebels; there could be an indirect oil-related angle in here.
It may be that I've just been reading too much about energy economics recently and am getting all consipracy-theorist. Even if so, I absolutely don't buy that there's any higher good for any of those sanctions.
Russia is technically a democracy, but given that Putin controls the press directly, murders opposition members, and thwarts opponents from running in elections, it's a de-facto dictatorship.
Those are all terrible, terrible places frankly we shouldn't trade with them purely on a moral basis - but we would tolerate them if they played nice.
FYI: Cuba did not 'steal oil' this is false. And nobody cares about Iran's Oil power, they care that Iran has a publicly stated objective literally of overthrowing the USA. And Syria has no oil, your points verge on conspiracy theory. The US would love to rid itself of any entanglement in Syria, and frankly Iran if it could.
The Saudis are the same and they also didn't play nice.
> FYI: Cuba did not 'steal oil' this is false.
I wrote "oil refineries", and I must be misunderstanding Wikipedia then, when it says:
"on October 19, 1960 (almost two years after the Cuban Revolution had led to the deposition of the Batista regime) the U.S. placed an embargo on exports to Cuba except for food and medicine after Cuba nationalized American-owned Cuban oil refineries without compensation and as a response to Cuba's role in the Cuban missile crisis. On February 7, 1962 the embargo was extended to include almost all exports.[1]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_embargo_against_...
> And nobody cares about Iran's Oil power,
Doubtful, given the amount of oil they have and export.
> they care that Iran has a publicly stated objective literally of overthrowing the USA.
Which is entirely because of the "tried to take them over and fucked up" thing I mentioned.
> And Syria has no oil, your points verge on conspiracy theory.
Of course it has oil, it's even an exporter. But here I thought about the longer-term US involvement over the last decades. They didn't start messing with countries in the region because of terrorists or WMDs.
(I don't claim to be an expert in geopolitics, I'm just saying how the "look at these sanctions, they're all against dictatorships!" claim upthread reads to me, with my mind currently primed on worldwide energy economy.)
Now - Saudi Arabia is not keen on human rights in general, and does not play very nice with their weapons, but the clear reality is that they would be happy to stay put at home.
The Saudi Government is not actively trying to destabilise the region or the world, they play nice with the West, and work closely with the US etc. to hunt down terrorists, and of course they have Oil which they sell freely on world markets, with no strategic dealings with others (i.e. China, Russia) - that's why they are an ally. So yes, democracy is obviously not the entire motivation for US sanctions, but it's part of the equation.
>Saudi Arabia was reported to be deliberately targeting means of food production and distribution in Yemen[47] by bombing farms,[48][49] fishing boats,[50] ports,[51] food storages, food factories,[52][53] and other businesses[54] in order to exacerbate famine. These actions led to the UN accusing the Saudi-led coalition of committing war crimes and having a "complete disregard for human life"
>On August 3, 2019, a United Nations report said the US, UK and France may be complicit in committing war crimes in Yemen by selling weapons and providing support to the Saudi-led coalition which is using the starvation of civilians as a tactic of warfare
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houthi_takeover_in_Yemen
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/mar/27/serious-ques...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_in_Yemen_(2016%E2%80%93...
I'm not remotely saying I agree with it, but its been transparent enough that their user base hasn't revolted and found something better, so this will be more and more common with software.
I'm not sure about the rest of CC, but adobe has a near-monopoly with photoshop. I personally use Pixelmator for all my image editing needs, but I am not an image-editing pro... if I was Pixelmator would NOT cut it... my only real choice would be photoshop.
> their user base hasn't revolted and found something better,
If no viable alternatives exist, the choice is not do it or pay whatever they ask. Which is why many cc users feel like hostages.
On a personal note, I really wish they would have done a Linux release.
Individual creators cannot be presumed to be in business with the government. The sanctions only concern people doing business with the government.
Adobe's lawyers are idiots and just screwed over a bunch of people.
Don't buy cloud shit.
Adobe had a choice when they chose to stop selling software in favor of cloud services. This is a perfect illustration of why that choice was anti-consumer. It shouldn't be possible to revoke access to software functions that don't fundamentally require remote server support.
Even if they didn't want to do that, they could do the Jetbrains perpetual fall-back license model where if you hold a license for version x for a year, you get to keep version x. You still get version y when it comes out, but if you cancel before a certain time, it will fall back to your license for x forever, until you pay your subscription again.
The problem is this seriously undermines their business model in most of the world which the US may in the short term decide to levy sanctions against as part of its bullying process. Venezuela and Syria have never harmed the US or threatened us in any way whatsoever, yet find themselves on our "shit list". Turkey may soon be there as well, and they are a member of the EU. Who knows which EU nation may be next.
If you buy US software it's not yours and we can take it from you at any moment.
Who wants that sort of software upon which their data depends?
Not a single person in the world with the least bit of sense.
Adobe should fight this as it undermines their business model.
That they are cowards who choose not to means they get what they deserve.