Lightroom 5 is miles better than what they offer today. Lightroom Creative Cloud is steaming dog shit. Adobe seriously gets to extort over $120 a year out of me simply for the privilege of reading raw files from a new camera. They provide zero positive contribution these days. All of these incumbent tech companies extract rents on algorithms written decades ago. This needs to end. I am very excited for AI to get advanced enough to whip up replacement programs for everything these companies maintain monopolies over.

> I am very excited for AI to get advanced enough to whip up replacement programs for everything these companies maintain monopolies over.

You are wildly off base. The algorithms aren't difficult or special. They were written by people reading text books for the most part.

They are able to sit on an on old algorithm for decades because the DMCA made interoperability and selling cheaper tools like that basically illegal.

Because of the DMCA, the work that was done to make IBM PC clones would have been close enough to illegal to kill all the businesses that tried it. They still tried with the liberal IP laws at the time.

Well that's a bit disappointing but i am aware that their are gaps in my knowledge. I had assumed it was the feasibility of competing with an entrenched firm, not lack of access to research texts. I will chat with Chat to learn more about how DMCA applies, thank you.