One more thing…

That professional cartoonist I mentioned above. He was a Hugo Award winner, with a presence in both fan art, and in commercial and underground comics. When he discovered Adobe had turned off the licensing servers for his version of Photoshop, he spent the last days of his life looking for a good replacement for it, and trying out new tools, because the tool he had used for many years and was familiar with suddenly stopped working thanks to Adobe. He did that instead of creating art.

I know how it is to suddenly have to struggle learning a new set of software tools because Adobe pulled the rug out from under you. It is very time consuming and frustrating. And of course Adobe thinks you just give them more money for new software you don’t necessarily need, or just submit to paying them rent every month whether or not the software gets better in any way shape or form…and everything is fine. But even successful cartoonists are living on the edge these days, and this one simply didn’t have the money to spare.

And so all the art he could have made, instead of struggling to find some new tools that would work for him, is lost. Gone. Never to become. And not just lost to him, but to all of us.

There’s how Adobe supports the “creative class”.