Comments on: Adobe Offers Proprietary Drugs to Students, Then Cracks Down on Schools http://techrights.org/2009/04/23/adobe-offers-proprietary-drugs/ Free Software Sentry – watching and reporting maneuvers of those threatened by software freedom Fri, 25 Nov 2016 09:41:40 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.9.14 By: whatever http://techrights.org/2009/04/23/adobe-offers-proprietary-drugs/comment-page-1/#comment-62339 Fri, 24 Apr 2009 18:17:46 +0000 http://boycottnovell.com/?p=9277#comment-62339 I’m confused. Adobe makes it really, really easy for institutions to get licensed (and in turn, supported — and if you’ve ever run a 30-60 seat graphics lab, you understand why having support for Premeire or Photoshop or In Design or whatever can be critical. Especially if these are interacting with stuff like Maya or 3DStudio or whatever) software on the cheap or for free. They contracr out an insane number of representatives to deal with institutions and the per-seat cost is almost always as low, or lower than, any so called free software alternative (ever try to maintain GIMP in a lab — you just don’t do it. Forget about what is the industry standard, the accepted standard for printers — GIMP and Inkscape just don’t work in a media lab — the support is nightmarish) — so why is an audit request and a request to not use unlicensed software bad?

Don’t get me wrong, Adobe sucks and individual buyers get SCREWED on the cost of upgrades and whatnot, but for design shops, schools or other institutuions that can get an account rep and VLM or VELM (volume educational license) deal, Adobe will kiss your ass. They won’t fellate you the way AVID will, but they will do everything they can to get you “legit” for very little money.

If that ends up being bad for students in the future is a different argument. As a designer, I’d say no. Only because if I had to stop using In Design and go back to Quark, I’d claw my eyes out with my tablet stylus.

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