There are probably a lot of you reading this who never actually got to look at the feature set of Photoshop CC because Adobe’s Creative Cloud licensing made it all a non-starter. Introduced with version CS6, the license initially debuted alongside the traditional upgrade path and Adobe’s respective disk or disk image-based installers. For a certain cost-per-month with no buy-in fee, you could pay to use Photoshop or other Adobe applications on a rental basis, logging in every month to activate the software for the coming month.

Cost-wise, Adobe liked to create the impression that it was cheaper. For people without an existing license, that was definitely true for the short term. But most professionals and companies don’t upgrade to every new version—since Adobe, like most developers, let you pay to upgrade within a few versions, you could stay up to date while owning your software at a lower cost if you were willing to do without every new release.

With the newest Creative Cloud release, Adobe has completely done away with the old own-and-upgrade path, forcing users to the rental scheme in which they no longer own their software. Stop paying your monthly fee and you’ll lose access to the programs you were paying for. Adobe’s official reasoning is that it was too costly to maintain both a disk-and-update system and the cloud versions—but excuse me if I fail to shed a tear for the company that reported record profits in 2012 despite a sluggish economy and the steady decline of Flash. If the new licensing scheme was intended to prevent piracy, it didn’t work. As I mentioned above, the pirates actually get the installers and no logins that paying customers don’t have access to. Figure that one out.

As you might have guessed by now, I’m not a fan of the Creative Cloud license scheme. As much as Microsoft and Adobe would like to convince you that this is the future, it’s a lousy setup that punishes paying customers who deserve the right to own their software. There are other subscription models out there, but if you compare them to something like Autodesk’s subscription model, Adobe’s is comparably awful. I pay for a yearly subscription to Autodesk’s Maya, and while you don’t have the ability to resell your software (which was successfully challenged in the EU but not the US), Autodesk doesn’t take away your ability to use the software if you choose to stop your subscription. That is the key difference that has people fuming over Adobe’s move. While you might get away with running CS6 for years to come, once your OS update breaks your software and you need the newest version of an Adobe app to fix the issue, you’re basically stuck paying the monthly bill. That is, unless you have the freedom to just switch to something else.

With the release of the Creative Cloud apps and news of this perpetual renters cash grab, professionals created various protest threads, videos, and petitions. Members of the CGSociety forum even created a comprehensive list of Adobe app alternatives. Take that list with a grain of salt, though—while Pixelmator may be a Photoshop alternative for hobbyists or basic professional needs, it and many other listed alternatives are only fit for very basic work, not as robust professional alternatives. But if Adobe sticks to its guns with the CC license model, its hungry competitors will get a cash infusion from defectors who will become vocal advocates. And that money could lead to more and more professional features. The entire industry is not going to shift overnight to non-Adobe applications because of this, but the company definitely just handed a bump to its rivals in every software category. I think a lot of people just rethought switching to Premiere from Final Cut.