Adobe’s licensing needs an overhaul

commentary 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.

Trinity Grammar School director of ICT
Robert Flavell
(Credit: Robert Flavell)

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 licence schemes. For
example, we use Microsoft’s subscription licence for all of our MS
products — we do an annual count of machines and they send us a
bill — it’s straightforward and manageable.

Why Adobe’s licensing is stupid
For several years now (I’d hazard a guess at around five) I’ve been
hassling resellers and Adobe directly about their educational site
licence. We own one 500-seat site licence 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 licence
and install on student machines simply because of how the device
was paid for — NOT how it’s used.

Loopholes and crazy schemes
There is a little loophole 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 &mdash. 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. But 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 licence anyway. Creative, but…

What do Adobe/its 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 licence] 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 kid’s computer from
their kid’s 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 it 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 licences 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 it 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 its head firmly positioned up its butt. Why
persist?

Unfortunately, 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.

Rob Flavell is the director of ICT at Trinity Grammar School, Kew. This post originally appeared on his blog and is republished here with his permission.

Editor’s note: we asked Adobe for a response to this commentary. The company’s response is as follows:

“We are continually evaluating our licensing programs and use customer input from forums such as this to provide feedback to our program managers. We don’t currently have a response to this customer’s comment directly; we are aware of the situation he is talking about and are investigating options to address.”