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Are Forced Subscriptions Driving 3D Users To Open Source Tools? 136

Posted by EditorDavid from the free-as-in-software dept.
Slashdot reader dryriver writes: More and more professional 3D software like 3DMax, Maya, AutoCAD (Autodesk) and Substance Painter (Adobe) is now only available on a monthly or yearly subscription basis — you cannot buy any kind of perpetual license for these industry standard 3D tools anymore, cannot offline install or activate the tools, and the tools also phone home every few days over the internet to see whether you have "paid your rent". Stop paying your rent, and the software shuts down, leaving you unable to even look at any 3D project files you may have created with software.

This has caused so much frustration, concern and anxiety among 3D content creators that, increasingly, everybody is trying to replace their commercial 3D software with Open Source 3D tools. Thankfully, open source 3D tools have grown up nicely in recent years. Some of the most popular FOSS 3D tools are the complete 3D suite Blender, polygon modeling tool Wings 3D, polygon modeling tool Dust3D, CAD modeling tool FreeCAD, PBR texturing tool ArmorPaint, procedural materials generator Material Maker, image editing tool GIMP, painting tool Krita, vector illustration tool Inkscape and the 2D/3D game engine Godot Engine.

Along with these tools comes a beguiling possibility — while working with commercial 3D tools pretty much forced you to use Windows X in terms of OS choice in the past, all of the FOSS 3D tool alternatives have Linux versions. This means that for the first time, professional 3D users can give Windows a miss and work with Linux as their OS instead.
In a comment on the original submission, dryriver offers some anecdotal evidence: Go on any major 3D software forum on the Internet and it is filled with enraged 3D users revolting against forced software subscriptions and threatening to switch to FOSS Blender as soon as possible.

Some major 3D animation studios are also working Blender into their CGI pipeline. Companies like EPIC and Nvidia have begun donating to the Blender foundation. Its happening. The move away from commercial closed source tools - which are expensive, stagnant and don't offer you permanent licenses anymore - is in full swing. The fact that Blender has an innovative GPU accelerated realtime render engine called EEVEE that none of the commercial software has has only accelerated this trend.

Blender is widely believed to have 2 - 3 million active users already, and the fact that V 2.80 comes with a much more usable UI is only accelerating things.
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Are Forced Subscriptions Driving 3D Users To Open Source Tools? More

Are Forced Subscriptions Driving 3D Users To Open Source Tools?

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  • I own Photoshop and Premier V5x. I have been using ps since the 1990s. Oddly these programs don't change all that much.

    • Re:Bought my Last Version of PhotoShop (Score:5, Interesting)

      by TWX ( 665546 ) on Sunday November 10, 2019 @02:00PM (#59399952)

      3D modeling/rendering software has matured a bit more in the last twenty years than 2d image manipulation software, but you're right in the sense that the software essentially has matured. The subscription model becomes necessary for the software manufacturer when they're essentially out of ideas and the userbase is tapped-out without much opportunity for the kind of growth they'd grown accustomed to.

      In order to remain profitable they have to switch to this model once they've added that one remaining killer feature they were holding out on, or when a platform change compels a new version of the software among existing customers, because otherwise the customer has little incentive to buy new.

      Hopefully commercial software customers retain their installation media and activation codes, so that they aren't stuck with a model that fails to produce actual new features but still otherwise demands their money.

      • Re:Bought my Last Version of PhotoShop (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Immerman ( 2627577 ) on Sunday November 10, 2019 @02:48PM (#59400044)

        Maturity is exactly the concept I was thinking of too. Once software has matured to the point that the next version doesn't offer anything compelling enough to justify the purchase price, forcing subscriptions is the only obvious way to maintain the old revenue stream, rather than admitting that their product is mature and should be retired to a lower-revenue maintenance track.

        Unfortunately for companies that would like to employ such usury tactics, mature software is also where open source can really excel, without having to try to maintain the pace of innovation and breadth of pre-release testing of the better-funded proprietary competition.

        • Re:Bought my Last Version of PhotoShop (Score:5, Interesting)

          by TWX ( 665546 ) on Sunday November 10, 2019 @03:08PM (#59400112)

          Unfortunately for companies that would like to employ such usury tactics, mature software is also where open source can really excel, without having to try to maintain the pace of innovation and breadth of pre-release testing of the better-funded proprietary competition.

          Yep. I have to do some analysis data reduction at work when we're planning our future network changes, including things like trying to quantify actual usage including things like switchport capacity. One of the challenges is that while i can extract all of that information from the switches themselves, consolidating it into meaningful reports is not something that can be automatically done. I've found the use of tools like Pivot Tables and VLOOKUP to be instrumental in achieving this data reduction. I can start with a pretty large dataset (most recent was ~30,000 rows describing literal switchport usage on 24-port and 48-port switches across hundreds of closets, per closet and per switch) and use these tools to count and sum that usage to determine how many switchports are actually used, and to determine minimum equipment requirements to satisfy this current usage.

          Thing is, I've literally never used Microsoft Excel for any of these advanced functions. By the time in my career where I developed a need for these tools, Microsoft had switched from the Excel I learned in school and through casual use at home into their Ribbon UI format, which I have found unproductive at-best. Openoffice and later Libreoffice have provided me with what I need with a usable-enough format that I can manage this kind of data-processing such that I don't need a commercial software product to do it, even if work has already paid for the licenses necessary for me to use that commercial product. .

          I see other software projects doing the same sort of thing. GIMP is pretty good, even if I'm stuck generally using 2.8 because of distro dependency headaches. Darktable is starting to make real progress for image editing such that Lightroom actually has competition at least for hobbyist photographers who want the power of RAW processing. Audacity is already apparently quite popular among those that create youtube videos and need to do audio work before combining their audio with their video.

          I expect this trend to only continue, especially as we have so many software products that are essentially mature and offer little more than versions for new OSes as needed.

          • Re:Bought my Last Version of PhotoShop (Score:5, Informative)

            by The Conductor ( 758639 ) on Sunday November 10, 2019 @04:36PM (#59400402)
            Spot on. I was at a recent Python UG meeting (with 60 or so others) and the topic was using Scipy/Numpy as a Matlab replacement. One of the salient points was that, even if you have a bought-and-paid-for seat of Matlab, you can't share your scripts with those who don't. Those licenses can add up if you have an audience of 20 for your scripts. Python, with Jupyter, allows you to put your scripts on a web host and all your audience needs is a flippin' web browser.
          • Was just going to mention Office myself. Microsoft haven't added anything identifiably useful to that since at least Office 2007, and specifically in 2007 the main thing they added was the (*&#*&FY&Sing ribbon, which makes it really easy to use for your 80-year-old aunt writing a thankyou note for the family dinner, and a total PITA to use for the remaining 100 million people who use it for their work. Thus Office 365, which is Office 2007 with a yearly tithe paid, and which breaks every time

            • Microsoft haven't added anything identifiably useful to that since at least Office 2007

              The ability to edit PDFs is the only reason that I have been tempted to upgrade my copy of Office, so that is one demonstrably useful feature that they added. However, I have been able to use LibreOffice Writer to create PDFs (including forms) from scratch, but when you edit a PDF it opens in LibreOffice Draw and I have had limited success with that.

              What I would really like is a good, cross-platform PDF editor (especially one that can do forms). I have been disappointed too many times when I find a good loo

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

                That seems like a pretty marginal update to me.

                • What? It's an actual useful feature rather than a regression - that's got to put it in the top ten post-2000 Office updates all on it's own.

                  As an aside - when exactly did "upgrades" get replaced by "updates"? That seems far too honest a term change to have gotten past marketing.

              • >What I would really like is a good ... PDF editor
                Having used Adobe Acrobat Professional at work, which I would naively assume is the gold standard for editing their "write-only" format... I'm not at all sure a good editor actually exists. And maybe it *shouldn't*. The problem isn't that there's not a good PDF editor - it's that people use PDF in situations where it's a terrible format (i.e., in any situation where anyone might eventually wish to edit the result). The PDF format is designed as an inte

                • If you're using *TeX (like I am), PDF is about your only choice. And when you need to typeset in multiple scripts (Arabic, Nasta'liq Arabic, Devanagari,...), it's really the only acceptable choice even if you're not using *TeX. I realize the multiple script issue is a niche thing for most readers of /., but there is another world out there.

                  • Are you editing PDFs though, or are you editing *TeX, and then outputting to PDF? PDF is a good output format - it's just not designed to be edited.

                    • Then I guess I was misunderstanding your post--I thought you were saying that PDF was inherently a bad format for anything but printing, whereas we use it all the time as an end product--a picture of the page, which we can re-distribute to all our readers.

                      Re-reading your post, I think I see what you're getting at--you're saying that people shouldn't edit PDFs, not that they shouldn't use PDFs (except to print). I mostly agree with that (assuming I'm now understanding you correctly), but with the exception

                    • You hit in on the head.

                      Unfortunately, from a software perspective annotation *is* editing, which makes PDF a poor format for publishing documents that people might want to annotate.

                      Fortunately, annotation is also the easiest form of editing - you don't have to try to convert existing data into anything meaningful or conductive to editing, (mostly) just output even more data on top of it. Which various tools can do... passably.

        • I suspect adobe could sell a record breaking number of photoshop licenses if they would merely ditch the subscription and allow users to create, edit, and share effect shaders (the pixel shaders it already uses internally when gpu accelerated.)

          It would also demolish the "photoshop plugin industry" and that might be what has kept them from adding such a trivially implementable feature. I wonder how many commercial plugin shops are secretly owned by adobe.

          • I could have sworn Photoshop had a thriving 3rd party plugin ecosystem, including countless free and OSS plugins. Am I mis-remembering, or did they jettison that at some point?

        • Maturity is exactly the concept I was thinking of too. Once software has matured to the point that the next version doesn't offer anything compelling enough to justify the purchase price, forcing subscriptions is the only obvious way to maintain the old revenue stream, rather than admitting that their product is mature and should be retired to a lower-revenue maintenance track.

          But is that really what's happening in the case of Photoshop? Adobe's subscription business seems to be going very well because users do see value in having the new version, otherwise they would still just be using their perpetually-licensed version.

          • Do they? Or do they just assume that they need the latest version because it must have fancy new features that justify the price? I mean, it's long been a truism that 90+% of Photoshop users would be served as well, if not better, by a much simpler (and cheaper) photo/bitmap editor - but everybody wants Photoshop because it's Photoshop.

            • Do they? Or do they just assume that they need the latest version because it must have fancy new features that justify the price?

              When they put out a new version they make it pretty clear what features it has, it's not "surprise software", look at all the new things that have been added over the past few years. Maybe you don't look at the features of a product before you buy it but that doesn't mean everybody is that ignorant.

              I mean, it's long been a truism that 90+% of Photoshop users would be served as well, if not better, by a much simpler (and cheaper) photo/bitmap editor - but everybody wants Photoshop because it's Photoshop.

              You can say anything has "long been a truism" when you don't have any evidence to back it up, that might be a reflection of your own position/use-case but then you should wake up and use a simpler photo/bitmap ed

              • > Don't pretend your experience is representative of everybody else.
                I don't. In fact I try very hard to stay away from saying anything about "everybody", the world is far to broad and varied for me to know all of it. "Most people" on the other hand I feel fairly confident about - they are after all the dominant demographic.

    • I think some of the problem is that indeed tools don't change, and thus customers don't keep buying new copies. So the subscription model means that there is recurring revenue despite there being little more beyond the irrelevant cosmetic change. The software equivalent of planned obsolescence.

  • Why don't they know? (Score:5, Informative)

    by WoodstockJeff ( 568111 ) on Sunday November 10, 2019 @01:43PM (#59399914) Homepage

    > Blender is widely believed to have 2 - 3 million active users already,

    FOSS projects don't know because they don't force people to let them know each time they use it.

  • Free Video Software: Black Magic DiVinci (Score:5, Informative)

    by BrendaEM ( 871664 ) on Sunday November 10, 2019 @01:46PM (#59399920) Homepage

    I downloaded it, and tried it. Seems to work.
    https://www.blackmagicdesign.c... [blackmagicdesign.com]

    Please subscribe and watch some videos: https://www.youtube.com/Brenda... [youtube.com]

    • Subscribed!

    • Re:Free Video Software: Black Magic DiVinci (Score:5, Informative)

      by NewtonsLaw ( 409638 ) on Sunday November 10, 2019 @04:22PM (#59400368)

      Just a tip... if you want to use Resolve for mission-critical stuff, download and use Version 15.3 -- it is *far* more stable than the current version (16.1) that still has more than a few bugs to be worked out. Also, make sure your computer has the necessary horsepower and a suitable GPU or you may be disappointed. Also note that the Studio version ($299) tends to be much faster with H264/256 footage or renders because it makes more use of your GPU.

      I've been using Resolve (and Fusion 9) for a couple of years now and it's great. Was a Vegas user (Magix screwed that up), tried Adobe Premiere via the creative cloud (that was crap) and fell in love with Resolve.

      I make about 5-6 videos a week for my YouTube channel and find the Resolve/Fusion combo a very productive software system. In fact, I loved it so much that I forked out $300 for the studio version even though I didn't really need the features it offers.

  • EU commissioners - are you listening ? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by neutrino38 ( 1037806 ) on Sunday November 10, 2019 @01:54PM (#59399942) Homepage Journal

    It would be great if the EU would force these company to unbundle these software and the associated services. Such company should offer
    - a basic version usable for professional people that people can actually BUY (not rent)
    - additionnal non essential value added services against a subscription.

    I have noting against selling software but software user should not be considered to be cows that can be milked .

    • Re:EU commissioners - are you listening ? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by TWX ( 665546 ) on Sunday November 10, 2019 @02:09PM (#59399968)

      These companies don't want to acknowledge that they don't have new products that customers want and that they don't have enough new features to justify purchasing a new version of the existing product line.

      That's when the milk-the-userbase starts. It's also when customers start looking for alternatives.

      Cisco Systems is doing this with more and more physical network switches, requiring subscriptions to keep purchased features running rather than activing permanently. Hopefully this bites them with customers jumping ship and they stop it, but it'll have to get a lot worse before it gets better.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jaa101 ( 627731 )

        If you don’t pay a subscription then the company has no money to maintain the software. How can they fix bugs, patch security holes, and maintain compatibility with new OS updates and versions? The only way is for them to keep inventing new features in an attempt to entice existing users to upgrade. Typically nobody wants or needs these money-chasing features and they just lead to software bloat and, worse, introduce bugs faster than they can be fixed. If you want quality, stable software then subsc

        • If you don’t pay a subscription then the company has no money to maintain the software. How can they fix bugs, patch security holes, and maintain compatibility with new OS updates and versions?

          It's not our job to send these companies money, aka the software and tech industry did fine before the internet. Software as a service only came about because the internet is a giant world sized computer and companies can now have direct access to customers machines. Pre internet everywhere they had to give you everything if they wanted to get paid.

          So I don't buy the case that subs are necessary.

          • It's not our job to send these companies money

            Then don't, we've had FOSS for decades now and there are still people whining about the non-free software business model, we've had hundreds of choices of Linux distributions for the same amount of time yet supposedly "tech-savvy" people are still complaining about the inferiority of Windows.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by green1 ( 322787 )

          If you don’t pay a subscription then the company has no money to maintain the software. How can they fix bugs, patch security holes, and maintain compatibility with new OS updates and versions?

          If they did their job right, there wouldn't be bugs to fix, or security holes to patch. In the physical world all of that would simply be considered "warranty work" and would be mandated by law.

          Working with new OS versions, first of all, you shouldn't hard-code version numbers in to your system and refuse to even try to run on anything newer (artificial planned obsolesence), but beyond that, it's ok for your software not to change without someone buying a new version, what's not ok is the reverse where your

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jaa101 ( 627731 )

            If they did their job right, there wouldn't be bugs to fix, or security holes to patch.

            That’s not a realistic expectation, to put it mildly. The solution to the high cost of using software is for developers to write perfect code?

            In the physical world all of that would simply be considered "warranty work" and would be mandated by law.

            In the physical world products wear out so people have to periodically buy new ones. This allows manufacturers to factor warranty costs into the purchase price. That won’t work for an everlasting product.

            Working with new OS versions, first of all, you shouldn't hard-code version numbers in to your system and refuse to even try to run on anything newer

            Sure, but you’re aware that new OS versions often change they way they work, sometimes for good reasons, in ways that break older software.

            • If they did their job right, there wouldn't be bugs to fix, or security holes to patch.

              That's not a realistic expectation, to put it mildly. The solution to the high cost of using software is for developers to write perfect code?

              I doubt 'perfect code' is the expectation, but 'good-enough code' seems to have become too high a bar for lots of software to clear. In the context of games, "a finished product" seems to have become an exception instead of the rule now as well. If there is a show-stopping bug that needs to be fixed, yes, patch it. However, the converse doesn't seem to be true, either - so many software companies seem to be perfectly happy ignoring their user forums for bugs needing to get fixed, even with subscriptions, an

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by whit3 ( 318913 )

                In the physical world products wear out so people have to periodically buy new ones. This allows manufacturers to factor warranty costs into the purchase price. That won't work for an everlasting product.

                An 'everlasting' piece of software can easily fail to work in a changing environment (assume a floppy disk, or an interrupt button, or a processor version which hasn't been manufactured in decades, and you'll discover this). But some hardware (antique cars) really IS sort-of everlasting, because it can

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by 605dave ( 722736 )

                There are several comments here stating how software "should" be. Out of honest curiosity, how many of the posters bashing subscriptions have actually worked on a profitable software project? I am not trying to be dismissive, because some of the comments make sense from an outside perspective. But after years of being a "tech savvy" consultant and manager I learned how to code myself a couple years ago, and now have a whole new respect for the process.

                Do not underestimate the complexities involved in creati

        • Subscriptions are NOT neccessary. The software of the past, was great, and faced the same problems, yet did not use subscriptions. They are a money chasing, customer milking scheme used by companies when they dominate a market, and want maximum return for minimal effort. As others have said, once a software goes to this model, expect it to stagnate, and new features to drop to almost nothing.

          The ironic part, is back when SAS was newer and being touted as the next big thing in software, one of the main
      • This is what causes me to look else where...

        Used, quicken for years. It went subscription (and upped the equivelent yearly price in the process), and I found Moneydance ($50), couldn't be happier, and left Quicken in a hurry.

        Used Photoshop for about 2 decades, last version was CS3? Missed CS6 before they went to CC subscription. Found and bought Affinity Photo for $50. Great replacement. Same story with Illustrator and Affinity Designer for $50.

        Adobe Premier can be replaced with DaVinci Resolv

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DMJC ( 682799 )
        Cisco should rewrite all their garbage software using rust... oh wait then they couldn't sell security upgrades to users...

    • The problem is that they can go as far as making the software free, and everything professionals need part of the service. Who is to say which features are essential and which are not?

      Government can't save you from this, only open source can save you.

    • It would be great if the EU would force these company to unbundle these software and the associated services. Such company should offer
      - a basic version usable for professional people that people can actually BUY (not rent)
      - additionnal non essential value added services against a subscription.

      Why? Look at the flood of people evangelizing FOSS alternatives, why not contribute to/fund them? Seems a bit silly when a company offers a product that you don't want to then go and petition the government to force those companies to produce a product you do want so you can give them money. Vote with your wallet and fund FOSS alternatives.

  • Pros Won't Switch (Score:3, Insightful)

    by neaorin ( 982388 ) on Sunday November 10, 2019 @01:59PM (#59399948)

    Some occasional users might switch to FOSS, though I suspect many will simply keep using the old versions they've already paid for.

    Professionals will just get with the program and move to the subscription model. It happened when Photoshop and the rest of Adobe's tools moved to this model, and it will happen again now.

    • Some occasional users might switch to FOSS, though I suspect many will simply keep using the old versions they've already paid for.

      Professionals will just get with the program and move to the subscription model. It happened when Photoshop and the rest of Adobe's tools moved to this model, and it will happen again now.

      Maybe... I mean I have a permanent license for Eagle from back before it was subscription only. By all accounts KiCAD is better now, though I know how to use Eagle, all my lands are in Eagle an

    • though I suspect many will simply keep using the Torrented versions they've already not paid for.

      FTFY.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sjames ( 1099 )

      That sounds like what Oracle thought before Amazon ripped their products out of it's operations.

  • I have Adobe Illustrator at work but I still keep Inkscape on my own desktop even though I can use Illustrator at home too. Same with Open Office and Office360.
    • Give Affinity Designer a try... I used Inkscape for a while, but it was frustrating and not at all as user friendly as Illustrator. The UI I thought was cluncky and horrible for getting work done. I found Affinity Designer, and it seemed like the best of both worlds. Cheap, one time fee, and easy to use and powerful like Illustrator.

  • Venezuala was the real eye opener (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mrwireless ( 1056688 ) on Sunday November 10, 2019 @02:04PM (#59399960)

    "Adobe Is Deactivating All Venezuelan Accounts To Comply With US Sanctions" was a recent headline here on Slashdot.
    https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]

    If you ask me, that was one of the most important and eye-opening news posts in the last two months. Even if you can afford the monthly 'rent' you may not even be allowed to enter the walled garden anyway.

    • How was that an "eye-opener"? That's how sanctions work.

      • Re:Venezuala was the real eye opener (Score:4, Insightful)

        by mrwireless ( 1056688 ) on Sunday November 10, 2019 @02:18PM (#59399984)

        Most people simply don't expect sanctions to mean "you can no longer use Photoshop because Donald Trump said so". They expect it to mean "your tin of baked beans is now a little bit more expensive". They don't expect it to mean something they already have access to is taken away.

        Well, I did anyway.

      • Adobe was not legally obliged to stop existing users in Venezuala from continuing to use installed software under the Trump edict. They did so anyway. And backpedalled later. That, there, is the problem.

        • That's mealy-mouthed bullshit.

          They have to stop a long list of persons and groups in Venezuela from using their services. They have no way of knowing who is who.

          They didn't "backpedal" at all. What they said was,

          After discussions with the US government, we’ve been granted a license to provide all of our Digital Media products and services in Venezuela. With this update, we’re sharing that users can continue to access the Creative Cloud and Document Cloud portfolio, and all of their content, as they did before

          They had to wait for the government to decide which way to go, to ban all the users in that country since you don't know who really is using the account, or allow everybody to use it because it doesn't help the purpose of the sanctions to include it. This is completely normal whenever there are new

          • You are conflating two issues, and defending the issue that I wasn't arguing.

            I said that Adobe users were locked out of using the software they paid for.

            You said that Adobe users were locked out of using Adobe services such as cloud. I am not arguing about that, because I understand that ongoing services are a sanctionable product.

            The first is not subject to sanction, which is my argument, because it not an ongoing service, but a sale for the subscription period.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sjames ( 1099 )

          The problem is that they are also not legally obligated to NOT stop existing users.

    • Anything that prevents the propagation of vuvuzelas is okay in my book.

  • Big studios have always customized their software suites anyway. So this fits right into their workflow.

    It is not monthly subscriptions that are the problem though!
    It is that you pay for the development work yet the resulting software is not free, even though it is already paid off. Why the hell wouldn't I just hire my own developers instead (or back some via Patreon), get exactly what I want, instead of fashion-of-the-day bloat, and have completely free software as a result? Do I look like masochist?

    • It is that you pay for the development work yet the resulting software is not free, even though it is already paid off.

      How much do you pay?

  • When you make your livelihood off a tool, you don't care that it costs ya $20 a month to always have the newest version and support. It's the casual users who are up in arms about subscription costs. They don't have a big need for such tools and would likely be served better by a less powerful and even free option, but they like telling people they use Photoshop and feeling like they're one of the big boys, even if they only do the most very basic work.

    • Re:Professionals Don't Care About The Subscription (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Nkwe ( 604125 ) on Sunday November 10, 2019 @03:05PM (#59400100)

      When you make your livelihood off a tool, you don't care that it costs ya $20 a month to always have the newest version and support. It's the casual users who are up in arms about subscription costs. They don't have a big need for such tools and would likely be served better by a less powerful and even free option, but they like telling people they use Photoshop and feeling like they're one of the big boys, even if they only do the most very basic work.

      For me it's not that I want to feel like I am one of the big boys, rather I want to be able to get help from "big boy users". I want to take advantage of the online forums and user content that is generated for the "big boy" platforms. If I need to learn how to do something advanced, I want to be able to ask a professional and have them be able to help me instead of saying, "Well in Photoshop you would do it this way" - while they are implying or sometimes outright saying "if you weren't using that toy software, I could help you."

    • But you care a lot when the tool stops working because the vendor’s server won’t respond to the software “phoning home”, or if he decides to discontinue the product

      Tell that to the people who purchased e-books that got yanked from the servers

    • What happens if they learn that the common verb for what they did to the photo is still "photoshopped" even if they used gimp? Will they cross the waters?

    • Re:Professionals Don't Care About The Subscription (Score:5, Interesting)

      by aaarrrgggh ( 9205 ) on Sunday November 10, 2019 @03:16PM (#59400138)

      You are very wrong. My company has annual revenue under $10MM, and we pay AutoDesk nearly 3% of revenue, or 10% of tech salaries. While Revit licenses are inescapable, we have shifted all of our AutoCAD use over to BricsCAD, which is fully compatible for both file format and automation. This saves us about 25% of our licensing costs per year, and it is actually better than AutoCAD.

      I still need to get our marketing person to get off of InDesign; that has been a battle.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by PCM2 ( 4486 )

        I still need to get our marketing person to get off of InDesign; that has been a battle.

        Do you have a comparable, compatible suggestion? Remember, InDesign was the product that ate QuarkXPress's lunch.

        • Obviously it depends on your needs; I am pretty sure all of hers can be addressed with Word and InkScape. We list her CreativeSuite subscription and any training we do for her on it as a perk for her side work.

        • Scribus is pretty decent, though not as good as InDesign by any means. Still, it will serve many professional needs. I wouldn't want to rely on it to make a fat coffee table book, but it's fine for newsletters, quarterly reports and such.

        • Take a look at Affinity Publisher. It's new from Affinity, and they are a serious competitor to Adobe for Photoshop and Illustrator already (which I bought both and use as Adobe replacements). I haven't tried Publisher, but it looks very powerful. Best part is, most of their software supports Adobe file formats too, for interoperability.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tom ( 822 )

        I still need to get our marketing person to get off of InDesign; that has been a battle.

        Because InDesign is actually very good, and what I've seen in alternatives so far doesn't hold a candle to it.

        Most Photoshop users can use Gimp or Pixelmator or something else and get 90% of the bang. The same is true for many of those tools, including whatever people used before they switched to Blender (which really has become competetive with 2.8).

        But InDesign still is the best offering in its segment, AFAIK.

    • Re:Professionals Don't Care About The Subscription (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Wired In Blood ( 720155 ) on Sunday November 10, 2019 @03:20PM (#59400154)

      Issue is, the article clearly mentioned this is about 3d, not 2d. Photoshop doesn't do 3d animation, which makes this a completely different argument.

      Things like AutoCAD costs $1610/per year (or $200 a month)
      https://www.autodesk.com/produ... [autodesk.com]

      Maya is $1,545.00/year
      https://www.autodesk.com/produ... [autodesk.com]

      3ds Max is $1,545.00/year
      https://www.autodesk.com/produ... [autodesk.com]

      Substance Painter has a sliding price, depending on your revenue. If your revenue is under $100k, it's only $20 a month (or $220 a year). If you make more then that, then its $99 a month (or $999 a year)
      https://www.substance3d.com/su... [substance3d.com]

      Arnold is another $630 a year
      https://www.autodesk.com/produ... [autodesk.com]

      And this is per person. And doesn't solve the 2d parts, so yes, we now add another $20, on top of those other fee's.

      So 2ish grand a year. About the price of a decent computer. Every year. I understand that when you make your livelihood off a tool, price is just another business cost. But there is a point that you have to stop and see if there is a better, cheaper way

      • Autodesk is adding an "indie" subscription for hobbyists or small shops, that is substantially cheaper. Of course for me it's "currently not available in your region", they are still piloting this I believe. But in any case, I'll continue to use the older version that I've already paid for, and still works.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by DMJC ( 682799 )
          I looked into this, Autodesk don't offer Linux by default, I had to register as a non-profit with them and basically beg to get the Linux version.
      • Itâ(TM)s not just the price. The copy protection on this stuff is incredibly shitty. Hardware dongles, networked license servers, etc. It almost always breaks on OS update, at least from my experiences with ZBrush & Maya.
    • Wrong, a business owner cares, as all those fees increase expenses and eat into profit. Especially when it's just a piece of the bigger workflow. I'm not sure how many people's sole livelyhood relies ONLY on Photoshop, and not other software and hardware, but I would be surprised that that it would be one's ONLY expense.

      And there lies the problem. Subscriptions need to be kicked to the curb, and cut out of your workflow like a virus. Because it might start with one of your 'must-have' softwares in yo
  • I'm frozen in time with Adobe Master Collection CS6, the last release before they went to the "pay forever" model. I'm also stuck at Microsoft Office 2010 (though I mostly use an even earlier version, 2003) for the same reason. I'm not going to pay multihundreds every year for software. I hope FOSS puts enough pressure on these companies that the resulting loss of market share makes them rethink their strategy.

    • I've got a VM running a compatible version of OS X set up specifically for CS6. That should be enough to future-proof my CS6 license.

      But it's also good to try out the current non-subscription alternatives to Adobe, since they won't continue to be developed without a sufficient user base.

    • Try Libre Office -- it's the "pay never" option that works fine for me.

    • Re:All my tools (Score:4, Insightful)

      by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 ) on Sunday November 10, 2019 @04:27PM (#59400386) Journal
      I don't mind paying a reasonable monthly fee to be eligible for support and updates. Some vendors have this model: you pay once for the software, then every year there is a fee (often 50% of the purchase price) for updates and support. But (and this is the important part) the subscription is optional; when you stop paying, the software keeps working. The bigger offenders in this space like Adobe and Autodesk don't do this. Also, their monthly fees have stopped being "reasonable" a long time ago.

    • "I'm also stuck at Microsoft Office 2010 (though I mostly use an even earlier version, 2003) for the same reason"

      Why? You can buy a perpetual license for Office 2016 ProPlus or Office 2019 ProPlus (they are the same product and go EOL at the same time) simply for the one-time Microsoft Tax price -- that is less than $50. You only need to pay the "rental rate" if you want Orifice 232 (which is the same product as the above) and pay a "yearly perpetual tax" instead.

      In both cases you get no support from Micr

      • The difference is that in one case you pay a one-time $50 tax, and in the other you pay a yearly recurring $80 tax

        I'm not sure you understand what a "tax" is. If you don't want to give money to Microsoft then give it to the LibreOffice devs or the Blender Foundation or another FOSS organization.

  • Main issue here is that if you "sell" software once then when all people who would want got it you don't get any more payments. So they were making regular new versions like windows 98SE, millennium, vista. And that was making things worse. People have to learn new software and with each new version it's possible to add less killer features than before. At some point people would tell: "screw this why I'm paying again just to have to learn stuff anew without getting any new features I actually use". So they

  • Renting software (Score:3)

    by sit1963nz ( 934837 ) on Sunday November 10, 2019 @04:42PM (#59400414)
    I do NOT rent software, end of story.
    I have dumped software that has move to s rental system and found alternatives. The chances of me coming back to the software renters is nil, try and screw me...well screw you too.
    I am NOT going to fund the grossly higher and higher salaries the management pay themselves
    Adobe and Microsoft are dead to me. I have other options that with I can buy (and cost me less) or are free (costs even more less :-) )

  • My pet theory goes as software industry as a whole tries to turn the screws on a captive audience and charge everyone perpetual rent the cost of ownership becomes such users are forced to create / contribute to / adopt open source alternatives which eventually become "good enough" to destroy the original rent seeker.

    • My impression is that there's an awful lot of FOSS stuff that's more than good enough, but the rent seekers (and now rent-chargers) own the mindshare so it's very difficult to get anybody to try something different in a work environment. At work, you need to accomplish a job Right Now, and the commercial software usually makes that possible once somebody's been trained up on it. No business is going to throw that training and software investment (even rental) away unless the FOSS alternative is Much Better,

  • absolutely yes (Score:4, Informative)

    by Tom ( 822 ) on Sunday November 10, 2019 @05:38PM (#59400584) Homepage Journal

    I've done some 3D game development as a hobby. I bought licenses to Unity3D, to Cinema 4D, to Terragen and a bunch of smaller tools.

    But as an on-and-off hobby, I would never, ever, sign up for a subscription model. It already bothered me that I had to upgrade all the time. If you use something every day, maybe, maybe a subscription is a model worth thinking about. But even then I'd prefer a choice.

    Subscriptions can be fine. But the fact that software companies push them so hard tells you everything you need to know about them - they benefit the sellers more than you.

  • The last non-cloud version of Adobe's Creative Suite (CS6) runs just fine modern hardware, and should definitely be near-free (with zero support) at this point.

  • Blender is way closer to 3DS max and Maya than Gimp is to PS. Blender basically the benchmark for what open source artist tooling needs to become to finally void the bullshit by Adobe and Autodesk that we have been putting up with for way too long now.

    That people are flocking towards Blender is no surprise. Entire professional studies are run by Blender these days. The netflix movie NextGen was done entirely in Blender by a studio that has since replaced their expensive Autodesk pipeline with a pure Blender

  • Even for smaller studios like the one I work for, Blender just can't handle a real animation pipeline well enough to be a proper replacement for long established 3D software. There is literally decades of a built up distributed knowledge base with Maya that is almost impossible to replicate with Blender.

  • The problem with a subscription service is the developers then get lazy and don't feel they need to keep everyone happy because the cash is flowing in by the truck load.

    This is Autodesk Maya as of today.

    It has been an Autodesk product since 2005 and, for the price they charge, one would think their flagship product would be a rock solid platform of stability and features considering they've been nurturing it for nearly fifteen years. Alas, this couldn't be further from the truth.

    For the record, Autodesk w

  • Linux (Score:3)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Sunday November 10, 2019 @10:54PM (#59401440)
    Movie industry is already moving over to Linux video editing & CGI too. Free & open source means that big studios can develop their own solutions on top without having to deal with getting permission &/or collaboration from the software "owners." I use FOSS for a whole bunch of multimedia stuff for education & training (elearning). My needs are a lot more modest than cutting edge studios & so much easier to meet with FOSS. A nice bonus is that I can share source files with clients & other subcontractors (elearning is often developed by teams) & it doesn't cost them anything to do so. It's win-win as far as I'm concerned.

  • I'm in a similar quandry with the (formerly Deneba then ACD, now independent again) Canvas illustration software. They sell either a 3-year subscription providing all updates/upgrades during that period (but which will no longer work if not renewed after that period), or a perpetual license (with no update/upgrade rights other than, in practice, critical bugs in the first year) for $50-100 more (depending on version, and I have the best one so I'd have to pay the most). And in order to get upgrade pricing o

  • Nice piece of software for CAD. Free for startups (up to a certain income) and free for hobbyists. The monthly fee isn't insanely high either if you don't fit either of those 2 criteria and it's constantly updated. Bonus, it's backed by one of the main players in the CAD arena.
  • https://lwn.net/Articles/39589... [lwn.net] we've been talking about this for a while. until FOSS can perform a task soup-to-nuts, proprietary software will control the market. once toy have a toolset that can perform in lockstep with commercial software, then you might see a change in the tide.

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