"The general perception is: Adobe is an evil company that will do whatever it takes to F its users."
Adobe’s employees are typically of the same opinion of the company as its users, having internally already expressed concern that AI could kill the jobs of their customers. That continued this week in internal discussions, where exasperated employees implored leadership to not let it be the “evil” company customers think it is.
For many though, this was not enough, and online discourse surrounding Adobe continues to be mostly negative. According to internal Slack discussions seen by Business Insider, as before, Adobe’s employees seem to be siding with users and are actively complaining about Adobe’s poor communications and inability to learn from past mistakes.
Unfortunately, they were also recently acquired by Canva. It may be all right for the time being, but I wouldn't throw my full weight behind them anymore.
Canva is an aggressively for profit company. They use the freemium model to manipulate users into FOMO, pay-walling the actually useful parts of their product offering. They are an unicorn startup from Australia. They want to engorge the entirety of the design and office market all at once, thus have expanded fast but entirely on the basis of venture capitalism and stock trading. They, as far as I can recall, are not entirely profitable yet*. This means that their model is incompatible with Affinity's model and brings about the fear that they will enshittify Affinity very soon in order to either try to promote their desired monopoly or to flow in some short-term profits.
*: They are profitable, but still their model is embrace, extend, extinguish, just like MS. And subscription based monetization is still icky and contrary to Affinity's original vision.
Well the good thing about their licensing is that you can buy a version and stick with it in spite of whatever the parent company does, and you're not banned from using older versions like with Adobe's T&Cs