You are a senior executive at Adobe.

The CEO of Adobe summons you in his office.

You are in charge of creating a secret task force. The goal is to systematically undermine open source software such as Krita, Inkscape, Kdenlive or GIMP. You have a $50 million budget. Nobody in the company knows about this project except you and Adobe’s CEO.

What would you do?

  • stoy@lemmy.zipEnglish
    2·
    4 days ago

    If I am a senior executive at Adobe, and given this task, I would immediately resign.

    It tells me that Adobe feels like GIMP, Krita and Kdenlive is an existential threat, which is just an utter delusion.

    It tells me that the CEO is acting on false information, and I don’t want to be part of that.

    Now, for the sake of argument, let’s say that I stayed, and I did partake in this stupid endeavor.

    I wouldn’t do anything to the software projects at all, instead I would have Adobe release a suite of free tools, say 90% stripped down versions of Photoshop, Premiere and Illustrator, they would be very limited, naturally, but they would use the same workflow as the real deal.

    That would make people far more familiar with Adobe products and push for their use in businesses.

    To be frank, I highly doubt that Adobe cares about what people use at home, what matters is what the businesses use, they are easier and more profitable to go after.

    The two killer features that any commercial software has over open source when it comes to business are:

    1. Standardization - like it or not, the world is standardized on Microsoft Office, people know how to use it, the format works well between different companies, and it is just the standard, do you want to be the CTO that has to answer to the CEO when the company can’t collaborate with other companies because they can’t open your files due to you picking Libre Office over the standard? The day to day work comes first, then you can start considering alternatives, in a years long testing program. Same goes for Adobe, do you want to have to answer to the board why a very highly paid marketing department can’t work due to you refusing to give them the standard tool? No, you don’t, so you get the standard.
    2. Support, you probably won’t use it ever, but fact is that with commercial software you have an entity you can refer to for help when it shits the bed, or they have a legal entity you can sue if you are pissed off. That last part should not be discounted too quickly, management likes having someone to blame, picking an open source alternative means that the buck stops with you, picking a commercial software means that you can pass the buck to them.

    Source: Fifteen years as an IT guy.