Adobe Steps Back From ALM Precipice

In one of the most significant victories for software customers in many years, Adobe announced late last week that it will disable its Adobe License Manager (ALM) technology for volume license copies of Acrobat 8. For once, enough customers pushed back against an overly burdensome anti-piracy to force the vendor to back down.

On its web page announcing the change, Adobe says that in the months since it introduced ALM with Acrobat 8, “we have learned that ALM requires a greater level of administrator resources than many of our customers have available to them. In some instances, there have also been difficulties in managing certain customer workflows and requirements.” As ALM use was still voluntary, those who were using it can revert to the ALM-disabled version of Acrobat.

Before we go any further, let me just make it clear that this decision regarding ALM only affects Acrobat volume license customers. Consumer versions of Acrobat and many other Adobe products still have product activation (which can cause its own problems, as we just recently heard again), so Adobe is not backing away from all forms of copy protection. Still, as we discussed when I broke the news about ALM, Adobe was the first major publisher to incorporate vendor-specific license tracking technology in its product, so it’s important to note that they’ve had such serious second thoughts.

So why did Adobe change its mind? From what I’ve been hearing from readers, it appears that customers made it clear they weren’t going to accept vendor-specific licensing tools. “From what we’ve seen, Adobe did a reasonable job in keeping ALM relatively unobtrusive,” wrote one reader after his company had finished its analysis of ALM. “But there’s a slippery slope if we go down that road. What if 18 months from now Adobe’s having a bad quarter and needs a quick boost to revenues? Will they hold to the privacy promises they’re making now about not giving the sales side your licensing data? So we’ve told Adobe we won’t be moving to 8.0 or any other product that’s going to require ALM.”

ALM scares those customers who know they don’t have a good handle on their licensing, and seems like an undue burden for those who do. “It’s not a tool that can tell us anything we don’t already know from our software asset management system,” said another reader. “But we have some departments that have to do a lot of reimaging, so making sure our licensing pool gets credited each time an e-license is redeployed would be a painful chore. And the cost of dedicating servers and staff just to tracking Adobe licenses … it’s not going to happen.”

Much of the pushback on ALM has come from university customers — in fact, it appears Adobe began dropping the ALM requirement in the higher education sector several weeks ago. “There is no way I could put one single point on what I find most objectionable to the program,” wrote one university purchasing officer who had been actively engaged with Adobe on the topic. “There are the infrastructure requirements, the lack of support for concurrency, etc. But the one point where I most quickly blew my gaskets was the way in which the installations were going be counted and reported back to determine overages. Basically, every time a user installed a license key, it’s going to go out and touch the Adobe servers as a registration. So if a faculty member installs on his desktop, on his laptop, and on his home computer — which he is allowed to do — that’s going to look like three installations to Adobe. If they come and tell me ‘guess what, you purchased 1,000 licenses but you’ve now got 3,000 registrations, so you owe us’ that’s all the info they’ll have for me. I won’t have any way of knowing who installed those extra 2,000 licenses and whether or not they were legal. Just thinking about some of the even more horrifying potential in this blows my top.”

I think it’s a good thing Adobe has been taken to school on this issue, and let’s hope that other software publishers contemplating additional layers of copy protection for even their biggest customers will learn a lesson from it as well. If every software publisher insists on having their very own complex set of tools for tracking licenses, there will come a point when customers just say no.

And let’s hope as well that customers learn the lesson that they do have that kind of power. But they’d better learn it fast, because Adobe wasn’t the only major software publisher to introduce new DRM for its volume license customers last year. If you will recall, right after Adobe’s ALM announcement, Microsoft started giving the details of its Software Protection Platform (SPP), which does everything corporate and academic users hated about ALM and then some.

Could SPP go the way of ALM? Microsoft will certainly be a tougher nut to crack, but once customers start flexing their muscles, there’s no telling what could happen. What do you think — is that a vista of DRM-free software I see on the horizon? Post your comments on my website, leave me a message in the Gripe Line voice mail at 1 888 875-7916, or write me at Foster@gripe2ed.com.

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