Adobe Cuts Service to Users in Venezuela
Adobe is cutting off its services in Venezuela, due to US sanctions against the country. The company will deactivate all Venezuelan accounts, except for Behance, on 29 October 2019 to comply with Executive Order 13884. Adobe will refund users for unused services if they purchased their subscriptions directly from Adobe. If you created an account in Venezuela but no longer live there, you can contact Adobe support to keep your account active.
Refunds are cold comfort for Venezuelans who depend on Adobe tools for their work. This move is an example of the dangers of subscription-based software. If Adobe still sold software licenses, Venezuelans could keep using their apps.
The good news is there are plenty of alternatives to Adobe’s Creative Suite software. We haven’t used all of these apps, but they’re certainly worth a look to see if they’ll meet your needs:
- Image editing: Pixelmator, Pixelmator Pro, Affinity Photo, and GIMP
- Vector graphics: Inkscape, Affinity Designer, and Sketch
- Page layout: Affinity Publisher, Swift Publisher, and Scribus
- Photo management: Apple’s Photos, Mylio, and Darktable
- PDF manipulation: PDFpen, PDFpen Pro, PDF Expert, and PDFelement
Makes me very glad I’m running the final 6.14 version of Adobe Lightroom – final in the sense that this was the last version of Lightroom for which we could purchase the license. One’s instincts protest subscription-based software – so glad also I’m running Office 2016 & 2019, not Office 365 (subscription-based of course).
Oh yes, despite the useful warnings from Jon Gotow’s Go64 re the license based versions of Lightroom & Photoshop Elements – due no doubt to the 32-bit ancillary Adobe programs such as Adobe Application Manager which install with these – both applications run nicely under Catalina. Yay!!
Bill Stanford
How long will it be before Apple is compelled to follow suit and revoke the Apple accounts of all its users in Venezuela? And what implications will that have?
I looked into this a little more. It appears that Adobe is interpreting the Executive Order 13884 very broadly, since the language in the Executive Order fairly specifically targets only the Government of Venezuela and people who are part of it (or who are on a block list). Ars Technica notes that Microsoft is not cancelling Office 365 subscriptions in Venezuela.
If you read the Executive Order, it’s a little hard to see why Adobe took this step.
So I’d be quite surprised if Apple would take any action at this point.