Photoshop moves to the cloud, becomes subscription-only

Soon, you'll only be able to Photoshop the pimples out of your Facebook pictures during the months that you get paid. Adobe's major applications,  including Photoshop, Dreamweaver and InDesign, are becoming subscription-only models, the company announced today.

Those applications had always cost money, but previously users only needed to pay a one-time fee to buy the software.

Now, however, the popular applications will exist not in a plastic box from Best Buy, but in the internet's magical Creative Cloud. And the apps will only be accessible to subscribers who can fork over $19.99 a month  for a single application or $49.99 for the whole package. 

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Frank Hoberg, cofounder of open software company Open-Xchange, hailed the subscription-only payment model as a bold step. "This is a milestone for the software industry and other vendors will need to make the same move before they are left behind," he  told the Daily Telegraph.

Moving to the Cloud is becoming a popular trend with many software companies. Recently, Microsoft has also introduced Office 365, a subscription version of its popular software programs. 

Some customers have  posted angry  messages  about this on Adobe's website,  but there's not much they can do. "Customers have to come to terms with the end of perpetually licensed software," IDC analyst Al Hilwa  told the Associated Press.

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