Adobe licensing is stupid

Posted: October 14th, 2009 | Author: Rob Flavell | Filed under: ict management, rants | Tags: adobe, software | 6 Comments »

I manage a 1:1 tablet computer program at an independent school in Melbourne. We have around 1100 tablet computers. Roughly 150 of these computers are in the hands of staff, the remainder with students.

We have run this program since 1993 and for a variety of reasons we have opted to maintain a student owned model – meaning parents buy a recommended device through the school from a recommended supplier. This approach differs from a school purchase model where a school buys machines on behalf of parents and passes the cost on through school fees.

The practical difference between these models to students (and the parents shelling out the cash) is nothing: Machines are used at home and school in both scenarios and software is purchased through the school via a variety of educational site license schemes. For example, we use Microsoft’s subscription license for all of our MS products – we do an annual count of machines and they send us a bill – it’s straight forward and manageable.

Why Adobe’s licensing is stupid

For several years now (I’d hazard a guess at around 5) I’ve been hassling resellers and Adobe directly about their educational site license. We own one 500 seat site license for Creative Suite CS4 (we had CS2, CS3 etc. before that and had Photoshop, Premiere and Macromedia software as well ) which we can use on “school owned computers” only. Of course this means that we are unable to install CS4 on the student machines because technically the school doesn’t own the machine. There are schools in our area that use a school purchase model for their computers and are able to buy the license and install on student machines simply because of how the device was paid for – NOT how it used.

Loop holes and crazy schemes…

There is a little loop hole which we may have been able to exploit – some (about half) of our parents lease their child’s machine with the school acting as guarantor and master for the lease – meaning the school owns the machine (on paper) for the term of the lease. Unfortunately with only half of our parents opting for this payment method we can’t offer this approach.

We’ve explored application virtualisation – streaming apps thin to student machines from the server – this has worked about as well as sucking a golf ball through a garden hose with CS4 and I’m not sure it would be legit anyway – still worth a crack.

I’ve heard another school asking parents to sign ownership of student machine hard drives over to the school so the school “owns” where CS4 is installed. Not only is this a little nuts, I suspect if tested it would breach the license anyway. Creative, but…

What do Adobe/their resellers say?

I’ve taken to asking software resellers “are Adobe still stupid?” every time I communicate with them. I get a variety of responses, here are a few:

• “It’ll [the sale of this site license] affect ‘boxed product’ sales”. – This is crazy – the one thing it might affect is the download of PhotoShop from BitTorrent sites.
• “Parents might use the software” – Frankly, so will the bogey man. There is no chance a parent is going to be able to prise their kids computer from their kids hands
• “They’ve met their quarterly sales quota and aren’t interested” – This sounds more like the truth, but in the current economic climate in the US it is hard to believe they can turn away our business
• “It’s with legal in the States” – This is a new one we’ve been hearing lately – along with “they do this already in Norway so it shouldn’t be a problem”. – Whatever – hollow promises and pathetic, spineless rot pedalled by boring software sales people – bah!

I’ve even had one reseller sell me the site licenses I’m after, telling me he had secured the addendum to the software use agreement. I smelt a rat, but let it go in the hope it would wake Adobe up to the fact that we were serious and they could be getting even more money from us. Sadly I was mistaken. I never paid the bill and the product or “SKU” never really existed and Adobe remains with their head firmly positioned up their butt.

Why persist?

Sadly Adobe makes software the kids (and staff) want and as director of IT I feel I must try my utmost to service their curriculum need. I have presented a variety of alternatives to the toolset CS4 offers, but the reality is the students want PhotoShop, they want DreamWeaver and Flash and Acrobat and Premiere and all of the other bits that are wrapped up in the suite. The software is great, the licensing is not.

So in this public forum I will make the request one more time: Adobe, please sell us your software.

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