Quick video demonstration:
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I guess you have to pay to rent it and also pay to unrent it as well.
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Only the rich, powerful and self-righteous are morally correct. 
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I think this is exactly why Lightroom is so popular. Most users don’t know what they are doing and don’t know what they want 
Although I’m being somewhat facetious, there is some truth to it. Lightroom is very good for getting decent results when you’re starting out and just want to adjust some sliders, but not think too much about the ins and outs of raw processing. I was that person once. I just wanted my photos to “pop” and other vague ideas like that. darktable, ART and RT have taught me a lot, and especially that I still only know the tip of the iceberg. But that can only be a good thing.
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Caveat emptor.
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I’m not denying that, but this fashion of calibrating everything for the lowest common denominator/clueless beginner is really getting in the way of getting stuff done properly and it’s annoying. Sure, the bulk of the market is the clueless beginner and people are willing to pay to avoid the burden of learning, so market dictates business. But companies always looking through you if you belong to the 2-10% of statistical outliers is kind of depressing. Everyone deserves their needs to be covered, no matter if they are a profitable market or not.
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I fully agree, and that’s why we should all be very thankful for darktable and open source software. I can see why a publicly traded company would target the mass market, but it’s sad that the pursuit of profit always seems to win out and dictate trends / people’s expectations. But this is obviously not just an issue with digital photography…
Yet it doesn’t seem to be such an issue with digital painting or 3D rendering, which are fields not-so-far-away (still images, still creative, still sitting between art and technics). So there is something about photography that sets people’s expectations, and I’m guessing 120 years of Kodak marketing (“you press the button, we do the rest”) has something to do with that.
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Lightroom is not the only raw editor, thankfully. There are plenty of choices that go a bit “deeper” than Lightroom.
ON1 and Silkypix come to mind, with a greater diversity of tools. Although I find their basic tools worse than Lightroom’s, some of the advanced filters in ON1, or the fancier options in Silkypix are rather neat. Silkypix is rather impressive anyway, and feels similar to Darktable in spirit somehow. They even have more-than-skin-deep documentation.
The other direction exists, too, of course, chiefly with Luminar and Photo Ninja, which seem to aim at an even less technical audience than Lightroom.
Capture One feels very similar to Lightroom. ACDSee, too. Zoner Photo and DxO and Iridient exist as well, but I have no experience with them. So, plenty of commercial options.
I think this will happen with any subscription you use - you subscribe with a monthly fee that is based on a agreed time frame. If you get out that means the remaining “rent” needs to be recalculated. So it sounds very normal to me.
I try to avoid software subscriptions though. Have only one annual one for a Wordpress theme. But not paying means no support, I can still use it though.
What is Lightroom ?
Tried to find it in my Fedora Linux distribution, but can not find a package that matches that name :
dnf search lightroom
Last metadata expiration check: 5:02:34 ago on Fri Apr 16 08:49:10 2021.
No matches found.
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Ouch. I dislike subscription model because of that.
Neo-liberal BS straight from the US. Customer getting out of the renting deal does not incur costs for the provider. I could maybe understand it for an hardware rent, where the hardware still needs to be insured and maintained (perhaps even heated and watched), whether used or not. But there, it’s just blatant abuse of power. Same shit as ending your phone, internet or insurance contract will be charged some fees in the US/CA, but prevented by EU laws.
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Just add this line to your .bashrc:
alias lightroom darktable
and you’re all set 
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I don’t have an issue with that as long as those are terms I knew that I signed up for. But it’s an entirely different matter if I signed up for what I believed to be a free trial period and come to learn that I had actually signed up for a contract. That just deceptive merchandising.
I LOLed at the the understatement.
Theres no doubt that lightroom is good software, but when comparing to darktable? Yes LR is better, no doubt. LR can handle shadows/highlights in a way that darktable never have. Yes you can use different modules, masks etc, but Lr can do it with 2 sliders. And editing images with wide dynamic range in darktable wil always get conflicts between modules that cause color artifacts. Fixings those will cost you a lot of time.
i have a lot of doubts.
the best tool is the one you can wield effectively
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I look forward to the day when we can all make reasonable statements like this. I really despise the habit of talking in absolutes about subjective matters and perpetuating the “us vs them” wars.
“x is clearly better than y”, “z is best, hands down, it’s not even funny”, “J fanboys always say that because they know Q wipes the floor with J when it comes to P”
I know we’re getting really off-topic here and I’m ranting with weird algebra, but I miss nuance. Bring back the shades of grey!
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Sadly, Lightroom can only be rented with yearly contracts. Payed monthly, optionally, but the contract is still for an entire year. (Although I did once make a stink about this to their customer service, and they refunded it anyway.)
I find this terribly inconvenient. I like to play with software, and I actually like subscription models, as they allow me to rent the software for a month or two and really get to know how it works, without incurring a huge cost.
I also do this whenever I need Microsoft Office for a month. Or when I use more mobile data than usual in a month.
Well, apparently this practice is somewhat common and not profitable for Adobe. Hence the yearly-only contracts. And furthermore, only a two-week trial period. Both are actively user hostile.
For me, this simply means I can’t play with a recent version of Lightroom, can’t get to know how it works too deeply. More of a loss to them than to me, frankly.