Adobe’s employees are typically of the same opinion of the company as its users, having internally already expressed concern that AI could kill the jobs of their customers. That continued this week in internal discussions, where exasperated employees implored leadership to not let it be the “evil” company customers think it is.
This past week, Adobe became the subject of a public relations firestorm after it pushed an update to its terms of service that many users saw at best as overly aggressive and at worst as a rights grab. Adobe quickly clarified it isn’t spying on users and even promised to go back and adjust its terms of service in response.
For many though, this was not enough, and online discourse surrounding Adobe continues to be mostly negative. According to internal Slack discussions seen by Business Insider, as before, Adobe’s employees seem to be siding with users and are actively complaining about Adobe’s poor communications and inability to learn from past mistakes.
Imagine what projects like GIMP, Krita, Inkscape, Scribus etc could do with a fraction of monthly revenue of Adobe.
Cool, then strike.
I was working at a company at one point that got a contract to build something I viewed equivalent to malware. Immediately I brought it up to several higher-ups that this was not something I was willing to do. One of them brought up the argument “If we don’t do it someone else will.”
This mentality scares the shit out of me, but it explains a lot of horrible things in the industry.
Believing in that mentality is worse than the reality of the situation. At least if you say no there’s a chance it doesn’t happen or it gets passed to someone worse than you. If you say yes then not only are you complicit, you are actively enforcing that gloomy mentality for other engineers. Just say no.
It is unfortunately one of the darker aspects of the hyper-growth-focused tech and engineering is the often highly mercenary/transactional nature of many people in the field. Like, there’s a reason Facebook pays engineers 250-400k or more. Sure, the work can be difficult, but most of the time it’s not that difficult. They’re paying people that much so that they ignore their morals, shut the fuck up, and just take the paycheck and do the work that is helping to destroy society.
It’s immensely distressing to me as a software engineer. I am fully aware that my morality is limiting my earning potential, and that makes me kinda furious - not so much at myself, but that our economic system is set up in such a way that that’s not only possible, but optimal (in terms of earning a nice paycheck and being able to retire somewhat early).
Good time to drop a reminder that Affinity’s tools are 50% off right now and are buy-once software.
Unfortunately, they were also recently acquired by Canva. It may be all right for the time being, but I wouldn’t throw my full weight behind them anymore.
Yeah same. I used to recommend them whole heartedly but now Im afraid they will go downhill
You’re not wrong! But at least for now I got a decent PS alternative for $45. We’ll see how things go.
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Well the good thing about their licensing is that you can buy a version and stick with it in spite of whatever the parent company does, and you’re not banned from using older versions like with Adobe’s T&Cs
I guess I’m out of the loop, what’s wrong with Canva?
Canva is an aggressively for profit company. They use the freemium model to manipulate users into FOMO, pay-walling the actually useful parts of their product offering. They are an unicorn startup from Australia. They want to engorge the entirety of the design and office market all at once, thus have expanded fast but entirely on the basis of venture capitalism and stock trading.
They, as far as I can recall, are not entirely profitable yet*. This means that their model is incompatible with Affinity’s model and brings about the fear that they will enshittify Affinity very soon in order to either try to promote their desired monopoly or to flow in some short-term profits.*: They are profitable, but still their model is embrace, extend, extinguish, just like MS. And subscription based monetization is still icky and contrary to Affinity’s original vision.
And they are a really great alternative!
…for now.
- See above convo about acquisition by Canva.
They control it, not us. It fails to include a libre software license text file. Some people never learn. 🤡
