Adobe announced this week that it will discontinue its sales of packaged software and move its business entirely online. That means you will no longer be able to purchase Adobe’s popular Creative Suite–which includes such applications as Photoshop and Dreamweaver–in the traditional manner.

In place of Creative Suite, Adobe is now advertising its new Creative Cloud, which provides online access to all of its Creative Suite products for a monthly subscription fee of around $50 per month. As soon as you stop paying for your subscription, you will lose access to the software.

As you might expect, early reviews of Adobe’s new business model have been mixed at best. If you’ve been only too happy to buy Photoshop one time and use it for many years (even as it becomes outdated), you’re going to be out of luck in the future. It’s likely that the monthly fees will price many individual users, nonprofit organizations, and small businesses out of the market.

If you prefer the old way of doing things, you can still purchase the current (and as it turns out, last) version of Creative Suite (CS6). Of course there are always alternatives to Adobe products, but few of them are quite as good.

And rest assured that your favorite Adobe applications will always be available for you to use at the VRC. Even with this costly new subscription service, Photoshop is quite simply too central to our mission for us to entertain any thoughts of giving it up.