From my perspective (as a consumer and employee of a large software company) all the innovation is centered around the demand for perpetual earnings growth. Few people seem to actually be trying to move the needle forward or truly improve a process, it's just making bills go up a little bit more every month.

Google just announced an unprecedented $25 billion in share buybacks. We're getting so good at extracting every penny as efficiently as possible from every segment that we literally have no idea what to do with all the cash anymore.

Thats not what rent seeking means.

This is demonstrably not true. Take Microsoft Office for instance. I got my first Mac in 1992. Office was $600 for the Mac. You were only suppose to use it on Macs you owned, and you definitely couldn’t get a Windows version for free if you owned the Mac version.

Now, for $100 a year, I can get Office and run it on my Mac, Windows PC, iPhone, iPad, web and Android device if I had one. I also get one terabyte of storage and add up to five additional users with the same benefit.

The usual counterpoint is that you could spend the $600 a month and own it “forever”. But if I had bought Office in 1992, I would have had to have an emulated version in 1997 for the PPC Macs, if I had bought it in 1997, I would have had a non native classic MacOS version.

Today the situation would have been worse with the iOS release cycle if I were stuck on an older version.

The same could be said about Adobe.

It seems like a win/win. Microsoft gets more money from me and I get more value from Microsoft.

You want to move to Affinity? Good luck when your corporate client requires you to edit an .indd file created years ago when the license didn’t require large sums of money regularly thrown at it.

Maybe instead of banning subscription formats, make it unenforceable for a TOS to ban reverse-engineering for compatibility reasons.

Cory Doctorow has had a lot of interesting ideas, but he didn't coin the term adveserial interoperability. It's a concept and term that predates the Web, and is absolutely the appropriate solution to many of our current predicaments.

All of this has happened before and it will all happen again.

While I appreciate that (and since I don't appreciate my work being locked up in proprietary formats, I primarily use either plain-text or LaTeX for documents), there's a whole can of worms around that.

[note that I do not know the specific details of .PSD files, nor the patent status of things below. It's an example]

As an example off the top of my head, Photoshop has a feature called "Content-aware Fill". This lets you delete a region of an image and have it be replaced by auto-generated "reasonable" context (if you delete someone standing on a hill with the sky behind them, it'll interpolate grass and sky for you).

So now I'm reverse-engineering the .PSD format, and discover that a content-aware fill operation is stored in the file as the pixel coordinates and CAF parameters; not the pixels themselves. The CAF algorithm is patented. What now? Under your proposal I'd be justified in carrying on figuring out how to make an interoperable implementation, but... I couldn't distribute that implementation without violating Adobe's patent.

My main argument is against them saying that subscription software should be illegal.

If they are able to hold your data hostage, then it's not a free-association relationship, and should not be called a subscription, but instead an extortion. Sell me a perpetual license, or sell me a subscription plus ability to move away.

    then it's not a free-association relationship

BTW Photoshop's .psd can be opened in others software. You can export FCP XML from Premiere Pro for Final Cut Pro and DaVinci Resolve (and probably others NLE). You can open Premiere Pro's .prproj, unzip it, extract the XML and edit it yourself; The same goes for After Effects projects, based on RIFF https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Interchange_File_Form....

Please educate yourself little bit about the products you're criticizing

In fact, it's standard operating procedures to "cleanse" an .indd file by exporting to IDML and re-importing.

It's up to you to implement something on the receiving end, but there's no lack of openness on Adobe's part.

It would absolutely seem ridiculous if that tool was a drill, or a saw, or a ladder. Those are critical parts of doing business in the building trades.

Software is of course a little more difficult. If executed well, many types of software should be a naturally dead-end business model. Develop, fix some issues, ship, sell, be done with it. Not entirely different from building a house, or a car - you could tinker with either one of those indefinitely as well, but that doesn't make it a worthwhile business model.

If the push to continuously redesign and add new features for the sake of continuing revenue generation wasn't there, software can eventually be close enough to bug free to close the book on it. Take video games for example - they are complicated pieces of software, but you can still play 10, 20, 30 year old games with little or no issues at all.

> and always having access to the latest features

Thing is, most people don't actually want this, and even many who do don't value it nearly as highly as the software companies want to charge for it. Hell, some people pay significant amounts of extra money for "enterprise" software support just to not have new features added.

Consider a freelancer, relatively new to their chosen profession with a sawtooth cashflow. A one time purchase means they can continue to do their job for as long as the app they bought works on the OS they work on. A subscription service means a bad couple of months and an unexpected bill locks them out of opening any of their old work and limits their ability to do / get new work. Your argument boils down to "well I can afford it, so everyone should be able to"

But nobody is forcing you to use Adobe products. Buy the Affinity tools or use GIMP if you like.

how much was adobe to buy outright? CS6 master collection was what, $7,000

I for one could never upfront that, but $70 a month for 100 months, including all updates in that time and new products as they release? sure, im game.