I thought DMS majors would find this interesting.
Adobe is planning on releasing a free version of Photoshop, named Photoshop Express.
I’ve never really bothered with Photoshop in the past and relied on the free open source alternative “Gimp” for most of my image processing needs. There is even a Gimp Shop, a program that basically recreates the Photoshop UI inside of Gimp for free. These seem like popular ideas online and I’m guessing that the gaining popularity of open source software and the increased piracy of software online is what is driving Adobe to try to expand its customer base to users that can't afford its $650 dollor price tag.
Link to article
4 comments:
I think that this is super interesting. I don't know much about open source programming and such but I hope we get to learn about it in class so that next time somebody in the coffee shop talks to me about it I can have some semblance of an idea of what to say! Thanks for the post!
I think it's an interesting move by Adobe, as they have been plagued by pirates ever since their early days. People love stealing versions of Photoshop because they don't think they should have to pay such a large sum for something that will be "outdated" in another 5 months. Maybe Adobe's trying to curb piracy by throwing the dogs a bone?
This has less to do with countering piracy / competing with open source, and more to do with thinking of the web as a platform of its own. We've seen a lot of desktop apps moved to the web (Google Docs/Apps), and Adobe's offering is just an example of a photo editing program moving to the web.
Photoshop Express is just the Elements of Photoshop Elements. So the feature list is extremely small, but it's a step forward. (Toward the whole cloud computing scenario.)
More interesting is the TOS controversy surrounding it, and the problem of privacy/security when dealing with web applications.
I think it's interesting... Photobucket just released a sort of basic image editor within the last week, too. Goes a long way toward making editing/sharing photos easier for the folks who don't have PS.
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