Adobe CS Corporate Licensing

Something that never sat right with me about Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (the Peter Jackson movie) was when Gandalf took Pippin off to Gondor, and Aragorn and Merry have their little exchange. Merry makes a joke about the foolhardiness of the Tooks, and Aragorn just looks bemused. It leads me to believe that the full scene probably read out as follows:

Aragorn: "One thing I've learned about hobbits; they are most hardy folk."
Merry: "Foolhardy maybe. He's a Took."
Aragon: "Yeah, you see, that's lost on me. I haven't really had any dealings with any other members of his family, so to even acknowledge the apparent humour in such a remark would be kind of presumptuous and rude, do you not think?"
Merry: "A fair point well made good sir. I will refrain from such comments, insofar as such comments are there to be made. Now let us make haste for the luncheon table, and eat assorted meats and rhubarb crumble."

Which brings me to the main point about Adobe's licensing of their Creative Suite set of products, including Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver and other such professional design tools, and the foolhardiness thereof you will simply have to take me at my word over.

It's as if the legal team responsible for the corporate licensing have intentionally gone out of their way to penalise the honest. Of course, products such as DVDs also penalise paying customers by making them sit through mandatory accusations and threats, and many games require a permanent internet connection to play offline, none of which applies to those who acquire the products dishonestly, but Adobe's corporate licensing really takes it to the next level and beyond. Let's take a look at why.

Adobe's Creative Suite has a fairly regular upgrade cycle of 1 year to 18 months. This always results in the following:

1. A new file format which is not compatible with older versions, with "export" only available the most recent version.
2. Approximately zero support for older versions once a new version becomes available (e.g. camera RAW updates are only ever available for the most current version, even if it only came out last week, and that bug fix you were waiting for just isn't going to happen).

Because of #2 above, many businesses in the design field want to upgrade as soon as a new version becomes available, as opposed to hanging back and waiting for the bugs that will become evident through field testing have been ironed out, or god forbid skipping a generation. But because it's virtually an industry standard, and people in, say, the print industry are having to exchange proprietary format files, then #1 above means not upgrading on the day of release ensures you can no longer be active in that field. Were Adobe a monopoly, then this would certainly classify as monopoly abuse, though with sensible licensing it doesn't have to be that way...

Yeah, sensible licensing, right... It's bad enough that every year or so when they decide you have to upgrade, you have to shell out retail price (or a slightly discounted upgrade price if you had a license for the immediately previous version) for every installation. To add to that, you are only allowed to have the licensed version installed; my boss came round earlier to make sure we were all complying with this clause. So the license you purchase to use CS5 actually includes a clause that says the licenses you purchased for CS4, CS3, CS2, CS1, and all previous versions of the software are no longer valid. The implications for #1 and #2 above are more than self evident; if you wanted to keep older versions available so that you could still exchange files with businesses who haven't upgraded, then businesses wouldn't be forced into the upgrade cycle quite as badly.

There is a sensible way around this in which everybody wins. The upgrade philosophy from the developers standpoint and the strict licensing conditions make this an ideal candidate for subscription licensing. Put simply, why not utilise a model whereby an annual fee is paid in exchange for use of the latest version. This way, Adobe get paid, they no longer have any moral obligation to support prior versions, all businesses get to use the latest versions as they become available, and nobody feels like they're being ripped off at gunpoint. Businesses will pay, because they're going to pay anyway, but this takes all of the stress and randomness out of the equation, and allows them to include it in the budget as a fixed maintenance cost. But they refuse to do this.

Foolhardy.