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Comment by splatcollision | Hacker News Reader

Pirates will still pirate regardless of having a lower initial cost subscription option - they're mostly not folks who would be paying customers anyway.

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It's not true to say that a pirated copy always equates to a lost sale, but neither is it true that a pirated copy never results in a lost sale at any price. Some people would prefer to have legit software but simply can't afford it.

In the case of Photoshop you're going from $1300 up front to $50/$35 per month. That's a huge difference in affordability, so I'd be surprised if that wouldn't make a dent in piracy, particularly in small businesses.

That might be very logical when we talk about things that cost less than $100 and kids but this is another thing, we are talking about people who actually work on it but find more than $2000 to be a lot, think small starting companies or freelancers. I remember when I was younger my dream was to one day be able to pay for it because they really deserve it. This new model surely helps.

Yup - honestly, it's the truth. Most freelancers DON'T pay for Photoshop. They don't have to - because they don't work in a corporate office, where software piracy can easily be enforced by BSA.

I know a lot of people 'want' to pay for the software, because they feel it's the right thing to do. A system like this will help them to do the right thing.

Have you seen the obscene prices adobe charges? For my rather light usage of image editing software there's no way I'm paying that. I know plenty of people who have hacked versions including businesses as they consider the price extreme. Yet they pay for other software.

Personally I go open source as I don't want to pay that amount for an image editor. On principal I paid for software from the day I could afford it, given that I make money from software. I find it makes me wince slightly when friends and clients ask me where they can get office, photoshop and cs5 for free. Would they pirate my work if they could?

So I don't use adobe on principal as I see their stuff as a total ripoff. Not very good either, I tried the trial version 6 months back, while better than GIMP/Paint.Net it's still got a pretty awful UI.

The only annoying thing is that a lot of people send you PSD files, so I sometime have to fire up another trial just to export certain layers easily. There are some plugins available for this but they are a bit cumbersome last I checked.

Exactly - It's great that there are a growing list of viable alternatives to Photoshop. Their products are seen as the default requirements, but they're not at all.

Unfortunately, for serious professional work, there really aren't any serious competitors to Creative Suite today. That is how Adobe can charge sky-high prices and yet still ship products with crash bugs and silly inconsistencies between different applications' UIs.

I'm always a bit surprised that none of the major software vendors with the muscle to put a few hundred developers on a new project for a couple of years have tried to break into the graphics/DTP market that Adobe dominates today. Given their reputation for poor quality and usability, it's not the most defensible position for Adobe to hold against a competitor with good developers and talented project management/vision people.

It sounds like you're not really using Photoshop for all of its features, especially if you're just using it for light image editing. Check out Photoshop Elements for $80.

I needed to use Photoshop exactly twice (essentially to import existing photoshop files) in the past 3 years. Mind you, I didn't buy it. However, I would probably have bought a one month subscription.

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