Those gnomish bastards! 

And their little red hats. 

their pricks 

or their little red prick hats. 

...for freelance graphic designers. 

I'm not terribly worried to be honest, deal seems reasonable enough. I can understand why they do it, for every legal Photoshop version there's probably a 100 illegal ones in the wild -- not like this'll solve that, lol. The yearly cost is actually competetive with buying yearly upgrades (in Europe at least, where it's way more expensive) They probably won't wanna screw over their customer base since the backlash would be pretty severe -- apart from their monopoly position perhaps. Besides, CS6 does pretty much everything anyone would ever need and this subscription stuff it totally gonna get cracked and pirated anyway... 

Gimp can do most of the stuff PS can do and is *free*. A lot of PS pirates are just too lazy to get past Gimp's learning curve, same as with Blender and Max.

Blender, though, is catching up a lot recently, see

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=72805

I bet the same will happen with Gimp.

2.8 got tablet support and single-window mode already. And there are artist packages like Gimp Paint Studio.

Plus, there is Mypaint which is basically a tablet friendly drawing front end to Gimp. And it is painless to move images between the two, including layers, with Open Raster format.

It really is good enough for most of the people who think they have to pirate PS. Those who really *need* PS probably don't need to pirate it...

In the end, it's not so much about tool X or tool Y, it's about skill and I dare say you can develop those skills just as well in free software.

You cannot pirate skills. 

gb, I mostly agree with you, but try finding a job (in CG/VG industry) with only Gimp and Blender on your CV...
For hobbyists though, yeah, Gimp and Blender all the way, especially considering the more people use them, the more likely it'll be that they will surpass their super-expensive cousins (in many areas they have already, for Blender anyways, haven't used Gimp in over 10 years). 

If you bring a great portfolio, are you gonna be not hired because it was done in Blender? 

...even though your observation on CV's is spot on. First thing you have to keep in mind is compatibility of what you produce.

Gb's analysis may be sound for the casual user, what we're talking here is WORKING with these Softwares.

Maybe people on this board are prone to thinking Adobe>Photoshop, since it's quite possibly the only tool they'll ever need to use extensively to make texes or maps, but obviously working in Graphics requires a religious knowledge of , at very least, Illustrator and Indesign. These are very different beasts, and you need to have reliable and exchangeable formats and features to keep up with the pace of profession.

And, quite simply, there are NO available freeware alternatives to perform the required tasks.
I'm not a freelancer, and this change of Adobe's policy won't affect me in any way, in the foreseeable future, but I think that people(professionals in the field, I mean) should be consider in depth what lies ahead.

There's a very interesting analysis in one of the pages I linked, down the page amidst the replies, I'll paste it here so I don't have to summarize, hits perfectly the bullseye, if you ask me:


�Adobe's entire reasoning is that the move �frees up our product teams to come up with new innovations faster.�. But,The product teams are still developing the same locally installed applications. The only change is instead of a single on-install activation, it's a once-per-month activation.
The subscription model is great to have, and offers benefits under the right circumstances, but the move to subscription-ONLY has to do with ONLY one thing - forcing people to buy software whether they need it or not.
I bought CS6 Master Collection last year, and I've been thrilled with it, but there's very little they could have added in a 6.5, or even a 7, to incite me to upgrade. Most people could, and did, skip 1 to 2 versions. The subscription model's only purpose is to stop the "loss" from people doing just that.
What people need to realize any time there's a change like this - it's been carefully calculated and structured to guarantee increased profits. If it was such a great value over perpetual licences for the customer, Adobe would would, by necessity, be making less money. They're not going to do that. So they sell it as a good value when, in reality, it'll cost the consumer more money than they'd otherwise have spent. The cases where someone religiously upgraded to every new version of an entire suite are rare.
This is exactly the same as Verizon's recent "Share Everything" mobile plans - in rare cases, a small number of people will save money, but for the vast majority, the rates increase. Unfortunately, consumers have demonstrated their ineptitude to such a degree that corporations can now freely, and convincingly, force moves like this at will. Microsoft will probably be next - make Windows a subscription model so unless you pay a monthly fee, your entire computer stops working. Don't think they're not looking at all the people for which XP still works perfectly fine and thinking "how can we prevent this loss of revenue?" The old answer was to develop something compelling. The new answer is rope customers into paying for the same thing and/or stuff they don't want/need over and over and over and over and over again.

Hmmm... Can it be any good? 

It really depends on the company and the job you're going for.
But it's a competitive market, and for equal portfolios, obviously a company will hire the dude that already knows how to use the in house tools of choice (hint : those are very rarely Blender & Gimp). 

Take my MONEY NOW! 

That post's the new format basically, and very well written.

And Bal is right as well. In the industry it's not about being able to produce stuff on your own as much as it being able to produce from within a team.

Often training very talented casual developers is more difficult than training complete n00bs because they have their own working methodologies.

In the long run the casual dev will be much better, but there's some teething pains at the start.

Valve has this the opposite way round when hiring from the rest of the industry and calls it the 'beaten wife syndrome'. 

http://123rrnhhgyyt.com 

Very nice visuals, but it is an idea that has been used a lot.

It reminded me of that arcade machine's game, King of Monsters, Mazinger Z or Power Rangers TV series.

About the CVs and portfolios, there is the issue too, that when hiring people, the first selection is usually done by people that doesn't have as much knowledge and experience as you. They have been given a guide that describes the simplest points to consider when making the selection. That person doesn't knows about the programs there are out there, so if he doesn't see Ps/Il/Id in the CV, he will probably pass on to the next CV. In those circumstances, the portfolio won't probably considered as he isn't knowledgeable enough to understand how good it is or not.

The silent is right on that you need to know Illustrator and InDesign too, as there are many things that can't be done without those two, like well done text without Indesign/QuarkXpress, or good compositions without Illustrator, for example.

About the freeware alternatives, i know it isn't the same, but i know of some freelances in graphical/industrial design that switched from Ps/Il/Id to some freeware programs and they are pleased with the results, but none of them could use those programs when working in companies. At companies you mainly get Ps/Il/Id and QuarkXpress, the reasons i heard mainly at those are that they have arguably better compatibility when exchanging archives, and because of the technical assistance they provide, but i could probably add on my own to those fear of the possible instability and ignorance, of the alternatives. 

The contracts from publishers often define which software you can use, up to and including the engine you develop in. 

Tools != Talent.

A talented employee can be taught a software package, the opposite is not true. If you know how to use a graphic design program, you can easily be taught any other one. 

Talking more about teamwork than tools.

Obviously an idiot is always going to come second compared to someone who is talented. 

but, as far as DTP goes, at this very moment you have no other choice but Indesign or QuarkExpress.
And then there's the rest of the suite, and trust me, the smoothness of workflow achieved through Creative Suite is not something that someone working on a tight publishing schedule would happily consider giving up...

Which brings us to the post I quoted above: given its almost monopolistic position, Adobe is trying to have people pay steadily and forever. No bull. 

Hi, hoping this is the right thread..

I�m a Quake mapper interested in commercial (yes commercial!) use of its GPL engine and maybe you can help me;

I�ve read that old Carmack message when ID released the source for free (and many people misinterpreted that !) so.. is it correct to say:

-if I build all my assets(maps, sounds, models, textures,..) on top of this Quake1 source code(modified or not), releasing ONLY this source code for free, I can create a standalone game and charge money for it ? 

The engine is GPL, which means that it itself can be compiled and used however you'd like (commercial or otherwise), on the condition that you also release the source for any changes you may have done to this engine code.

The original Quake assets and game code are not released under that license. So you can't reuse parts of the game code or textures etc in your commercial product.

Any game code, assets, tools, etc you make that are not the engine are of course not subject to this.

You should read the entire license, but the gist of it is that you can do
anything you want with the code, including sell your new version. The catch
is that if you distribute new binary versions, you are required to make the
entire source code available for free to everyone.

read the .txt files
https://github.com/id-Software/Quake 

What if you were to create a kickstarter for a new expansion pack for the original game, but release the actual game for free?
I know Sock was going to do something similar with ITS. 

If this is about your pirates mod, forget it. 

Fifth: I would suspect to distribute any of the original Quake assets along with it, you would need permission from id (likely paying a license fee). I'm a little murky on how the game code side permissions work out here though, but I'm betting doing a commercial mod would be much the same, in that you'd need to pay a licensing fee.

What Sock wanted to do was slightly different if I understood correctly, he wanted distribute the mod with the shareware version of Quake, such that anyone could download the entire package and play. 

is that the kickstarter pays for the development of the mod but the actual release is free. (and if enough money was raised then a licence could be acquired for a boxed version of the mod)