Comment on photopea.com now locks out users blocking ads
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 3 weeks agoI didn’t “think I got you”; I was leading into something: what was it about Photopea prior to this that made them fundamentally different from Digikam, Slackware, and discuss.tchncs? I’ve donated to Lemmy too and various other FOSS projects, so I authentically appreciate that your donations strengthened that interconnected ecosystem.
You clearly got plenty of use out of them, indicating how integral this apparently was into your workflow. You don’t show any indication you had problems with the Photopea maintainer’s actions or attitude before this. Was it the fact that Photopea isn’t FOSS? I’d agree it’s a huge difference, but at the same time, they’re basically free as in beer, and you weren’t just idly not paying them; you were actively using their finite resources. Wouldn’t you agree that, even if you don’t want to give money to proprietary software (assuming again that’s the reason), they at least deserve to break even? If so, you could’ve just whitelisted them on uBO. But I also resent digital advertising for ethical reasons and because it’s a vector for malware, so I’d understand not wanting to turn off uBO and not wanting to give €5/month in compensation. But then it looks like, despite being plenty familiar with the FOSS ecosystem, you never gave it a fair shake. You just called GIMP icky and didn’t do the bare minimum level of searching that’d tell you ImageMagick exists for batch edits.
So realistically, it sounds like you were never going to support the Photopea maintainer regardless of what they did or how they acted, and now that they’ve cut you off from using their service for free, you’re acting like this is some kind of principled stance rather than being a lazy, entitled cheapskate.
lichtmetzger@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
That definitely plays into it, but the major point for me is that it’s an alternative to Photoshop, which it literally tries to mimick as best as you can in a browser, down to the same keyboard shortcuts Photoshop uses.
Most people here would probably agree that Adobe is a very greedy company. So when there’s an alternative to their software that works fine for many years and then gets turned into a subscription model while the author actively fights uBlock, it just feels…wrong. It’s just the same playbook, but with a slightly lower cost.
I also think it’s very hypocritical to accuse me of freeloading from Photopea, because that project uses other open-source libraries under the hood. Did anyone ask the developer if he financially supported the projects that he is profiting off? He doesn’t even mention them on the website (or if he does, it’s not easy to find), but you can see them when you deobfuscate the Javascript blob.
If someone criticizes me for using this project ad-free, it’s just as valid to criticize the developer for using open-source libraries in a closed-source project (as closed-source as a web-application can be).
But to break it down to a simple point: I would’ve paid for the software if it cost 5€/month. That’s 60€ per year, which is reasonable for an image manipulation tool that can run most of its features locally. But 96€/year is too much. I’m not moving away from Adobe to pay for another big subscription. Now that ship has sailed for me completely, after this whole uBlock fiasco.
I know about ImageMagick and as I’ve said in another comment, a commandline tool is not suitable for cropping different areas of multiple images, I need a visual representation. GIMP might have improved, you’re right on that point. I haven’t used it in a long time and I will try to see if it’s better now (2.x was painful and anybody saying otherwise is simply delusional).
Not sure why this was neccessary. You started out so eloquently and then your emotions got the best of you. I believe you can do better than the typical Reddit “discussion”.