While I appreciate the sentiment, the world where you could use the same software for many years without updates is gone. These days developers have to invest significant time and effort into making sure the software just runs on the constantly updated operating systems and platforms — which costs money on an ongoing basis. Expecting your software to be updated regularly without paying regularly makes no sense.

So either you intend to run that exact binary that you downloaded (because that is the tool you bought), or the ongoing costs need to be covered somehow. Some companies do it through subscriptions and some play a game of "no, you don't have to update, but here is this new shiny (more bloated, too) version that we produce every 2 years, you can get it for $50 and OWN IT FOREVER (well, until the next shiny comes along in 2 years time". But it's a game, and the drawback is that there is incentive for bloating software instead of just maintaining it and fixing bugs.

A software that costs $500-15k is only feasible for a B2B type business.

i’m confused… all versions of the DAWs they mentioned in the parent comment are as near as makes no difference below £500.

> Live 12 Suite: £539

> Live 12 Standard: £259

> Live 12 Intro: £69 (nice)

https://www.ableton.com/en/shop/live/

> FL Studio Full: £469 (nice)

> FL Studio Signature: £279

> FL Studio Producer: £199

> FL Studio Fruity: £89

https://www.image-line.com/fl-studio/compare-editions/

> Bitwig Studio: £339

> Bitwig Studio Producer: £169 (nice)

> Bitwig Studio Essentials: £79

https://www.bitwig.com/buy/

> Logic Pro: £199

—-

in case you were replying to their original top-level comment

> Photoshop £22.99 pcm (£276 pa)

> Photoshop Photography £19.99 pcm (£240 pa)

> Photoshop All Creative Cloud £59.99 pcm (£720 pa)

this last one ^ bundles all the proprietary adobe “rented” software they mentioned into one package.

https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/plans.html

so even then your figures don’t seem to make sense?

And the worst thing about that 'package' is that if you need (say) just Photoshop + Illustrator - well suddenly the 'cheapest' way to do that is paying for the entire package of garbage that you don't want and will never need.

In USD currently:

FL Studio Producer Edition = $180

Logic X = $200

Bitwig Producer = $200

Ableton Standard = $450

Reaper = $60 (personal use) or $225

Pixelmator = $50

Davinci Resolve = Free or $300

I don't know many people left who pay for their OS these days.

Don't forget that VMs exists.

I don't mind paying the upgrade price when I need the newer version, but that should be an informed decision. These day, subscriptions are actual gatekeepers to features where when you cancel it, you lose access to the software "pro" features.

What’s different today?

Today everything is connected to the internet and exposed to threats, so the updates are much more frequent, and OS makers take advantage of this to push additional stuff and even more changes. The result is a treadmill.

Of course CASIO is not connected to the internet, it won't allow me to steer it with my fancy phone app. So maybe, just maybe, connecting everything to the internet is a simple mistake?

I bought my Lightroom when it was possible and am using with my camera. Once I buy a new camera, it won't be supported in lightroom. And I won't be able to upgrade it because now they moved to the subscription model. And I make photos every 5 months let's say... And lightroom them even less often

i’ve used repear for years on and off without paying anything. new updates come out all the time. fixes, new features etc. (every time i open Reaper I hang my head in shame for not having bought a license).

repear isn’t a profit optimised entity. i gather it is software created and maintained primarily for people to use. licenses cover costs.

adobe/microsoft are profit optimised entities. people using the software is secondary to them making money off it. subscriptions are there to make them profit, not to cover their costs.

It's easy to keep your machines secured even if they are using a decades old OS. Businesses are still depending on a lot of old software and hardware, because it gets the job done with great efficiency.

If I buy a physical lock that's found to be easily opened with a toothpick once it's in the mass market, I'd expect a recall and it to be fixed. With software, it's even easier to deploy a fix.

There's an expectation that purchased software is usable. A server that's connected to the internet that can be compromised easily is no longer usable. Firms selling software applications have an obligation to provide security updates for the life of the product.

My bet is that none of the commenters in this thread (full of mentions of sustainable development) actually run a full-time software business and make a living on it. I do. Which is why I understand why subscriptions make sense.

I suppose it always was.

https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkID=2113574&CLCID=0x10...

If I block it from accessing Microsoft domains in Little Snitch, it goes into readonly mode after about a month. Opening a hole in the firewall lets it start working again. Previous versions from several years earlier didn't do that.

Actually come to that, my wife has Windows 10 and runs Photoshop CS2 occasionally.

I was unable to figure out how to download/purchase a version of Office from MSFT that would run under macOS 12[1]. But in my searching, I ended up here:

https://github.com/alsyundawy/Microsoft-Office-For-MacOS

So she's now running a volume-licensed version of Office 2019. MSFT seems to tolerate not necessarily legitimate volume licensing I guess as these have been floating around the internet forever.

[1] e.g. https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/what-...

I have a very vague memory that is was $200 in the 2000s, so if accurate the price has gone down.

Given we're on HN news, I thought it was implied that I was referring mostly to the exhaustion at being faced with a perpetually increasing amount of rent-seeking in the form of SaaS.

With software subscriptions, I don't have the option of saying "I need to rent lightroom for 3 hours to edit this session." and have it be priced accordingly. No matter what, I'm on the hook for at minimum a month. On the flip side of that, since I use it so frequently, it's insulting that my only option is just to rent it. I can buy other tools outright and own them, so I'd also like to own my digital tools as well.

Nothing against GIMP, I just found it too hard to learn coming from photoshop.

I'm looking for a simple editor that can do color adjustments, crop/resize images, and add text.

https://krita.org/en/

Those are all pretty simple in GIMP though? I'm not doubting that they are different from Photoshop but how long could it take to learn the GIMP way?

Cropping and resizing are trivial. It would take less than one minute to learn how.

For more professional work Clut (Color Look Up Table) is supported by gmic as well.

I also made my own open source tool to pass gmic filters to whole videos, see an example here [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8of-R-5zcs

I'm not going to link to a specific one implying I'm recommending it, but a web search will show multiple.

One important gimp note is if you don't have 3.0+ already, get it. It finally has non-destructive editing, which is the main reason I had to keep using ps for for a long time.

RIP GIMPshop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMPshop

>It finally has non-destructive editing

not for the fonts unfortunately, if you resize a text with the scale tool, it gets rasterized

I'd be interested in a similar basic tool as paint for mac and Linux (and possibly also for windows, if MS crappifies Paint, after it has tried to kill it earlier)

Photopea is very close but i keep coming back to PDN either VM or RDP

Also the icons are terrible (at least on the mac), I find it really hard to identify a tool, these monochrome icons set me off and slowed me down since Visual Studio 2012. This fad is a really good example for design trends ruining productivity.

https://www.photopea.com/

It has a subscription option, but also a “buy outright” option, and it’s often on sale for half price for the permanent license, ends up costing around ~$200 and it works on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

I think it’s very good, though I am not a professional video editor by trade.

Once upon a time, we complained about undependable applications that, although installed on a computer, dared to "phone home".

Before that, we complained about undependable applications that, while not fucking around with remote servers, employed invasive and annoying anti-piracy measures.

This might not seem like much but that has been something I have struggled with other companies over.

I use KDENLive a lot and I find it to be an excellent product. Not perfect, but well thought out and powerful. Documentation I give a C grade too. It's awesome that some exists, but it tends to be outdated and frequently omits details about the specific thing needed. On Linux I do recommend using the App Image or Flatpak though as I have run into dependency issues (mainly codecs) when using system packages such as Fedora's.

For a typical user/consumer who just needs a video editor that can do more than just trivial cuts, I think it's an excellent option and it's the one I use and recommend to others. Unless you're looking to do advanced or highly complex products, it can do it all and in a fairly intuitive way. There are also youtube videos and such that demonstrate nearly everything you might need to do so there are plenty of available resources.

Eventually that guy/girl in Nebraska is going to look elsewhere.

Resolve is worth learning, and not that hard, you're right. But Resolve is not a "pick it up and it pretty much explains itself" software either.