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Buying a new license

Participant ,
Nov 03, 2020 Nov 03, 2020

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Hi,

I am currently running CF10 on an old Windows server.  We need to upgrade the server and I inquired through Adobe about a new CF license.  I wanted to know if we qualified for an upgrade (we don't as it needs to be one version ago) or a non-profit discount.

This led into a lot of technical talk (which I am not qualified for) so I got them in tough with our server team.  It came down to how large our site is and how many cores our server had.  They proposed an annual cost of about $7,000. 

I don't understand this.  When I bought our CF10 license (a hundred years ago) I just bought a Standard license, installed it, and built the site.  It looks like a Standard license is $2,499.00 and an Enterprise (I don't believe I need this) is $9,499.00.  Those are one-time fees.

Can't I just purchase a Standard license, transfer my files from one server to the other and move on?  It's a very small sand simple site.  Why is Adobe proposing a license much more expensive than I need, and at an annual cost?  They have not been easy to deal with or understand.

Thank you

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correct answers 1 Correct answer

Community Expert , Nov 03, 2020 Nov 03, 2020

There are a couple of ways to answer this. And both should be very good (and different) news for you, though someone else may have still different thoughts. There are also a couple of points of clarification that should be made, which may not seem "as good" news, but they "are what they are" per the CF EULA (end user licensing agreement). More on that in a moment.

 

On the whole, though, I think what I have to say is more good news (and contrary to what you have been told) than bad.

 

First, per

...

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Community Expert ,
Nov 03, 2020 Nov 03, 2020

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There are a couple of ways to answer this. And both should be very good (and different) news for you, though someone else may have still different thoughts. There are also a couple of points of clarification that should be made, which may not seem "as good" news, but they "are what they are" per the CF EULA (end user licensing agreement). More on that in a moment.

 

On the whole, though, I think what I have to say is more good news (and contrary to what you have been told) than bad.

 

First, perhaps "bad news" for someone wanting to get a discounted upgrade for CF10 to CF2018 is that Adobe has never supported an upgrade discount to 2 or more releases back. They have always (in recent releases) offered only a discount to upgrade from the LAST release, so CF2016 while CF2018 is the current version (which will change soon, with the public beta of the next CF release now open, when that new release comes out, and then likely only those on CF2018 will be able to get discounted upgrades to that new version).

 

Second, some good news there is that there IS another option to get such a discount. You don't HAVE to buy CF from Adobe.  There are resellers, and one of them is Intergral (makers of the FusionReactor CF monitor), who also have a CF reselling site at buy-adobe-software.com (or more simply buy-cf.com). And at that site you will find that people running CF 10 (or 11 or 9) CAN get a 25% discount off up licensing CF2018, as part of a "25th birthday for CF" celebration.

 

That discount may well end when the next CF version comes out.  Since Adobe has not (and never does) announce WHEN that will be, you should jump on that discount ASAP, as it seems to suit your situation perfectly.

 

Third, as for the assertion that you may need to buy other than a simple "one-time" CF license like before, well, that's another matter, and it seems an effort on some parts of the Adobe sales team to assert that people "running a SaaS service" via CF need to license it differently than just "buying a simple CF license". Read the EULA for yourself, to see if you would be in violating of it (such as if running a "service bureau", etc). There have been others from Adobe who have piped in (here and other public places) to say that those sales people are over-stepping in their accusations.

 

Bottom line, if you are not in violation of that EULA, then it would seem you need not buy more than a simple "one-time" license like before. Of course, each client (and lawyers and judges/arbitrators) needs to make the final call for themselves.

 

Finally, as for how many cores you have, that too is indeed covered in that EULA, and it may be "bad news" for some. For CF Standard, it's licensed "per 2 cores", so if you have CF on a 4-core machine, you are supposed to buy 2 Std licenses for that one machine. If it's an 8-core machine, then you'd need 4 (which is more expensive than a single CF Enterprise license, which itself covers 8 cores--so for some people, it's cheaper and better to go to Enterprise. I did a talk recently on the differences and those matters. More at the presentations section of carehart.org).

 

(Adobe is not the only company to charge "per core". Heck, SQL Server is priced per core and can quickly become astronomically more expensive than CF on a same-configured box.)

 

So I hope that helps you, and that you see it mostly as good news. I know that some see any discussion of having to "pay for CF" as one more reason to deride it and people who do pay for it, and see it as another "nail in its coffin". But for some, it's totally worth it to pay for CF, and I hope we can avoid others coming on to make this yet another debate about that topic.

 

But what you've raised is an important one, that people do share news of once in a while. It seems rather few and far between, which makes me think it's some segment of the Adobe sales team that engages in that ploy. trying to drive people to a different annual license. Let's see if anyone else has anything more (especially more authoritative) to say.


/Charlie (troubleshooter, carehart.org)

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Participant ,
Nov 03, 2020 Nov 03, 2020

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Fantastic help. Thank you.

We run a small departmental website on our intranet, so I suspect a one-time license will work for us.  I can't read the EULA as the link is not working.  I also search and got the same dead link.

The proposed server is 4 cores, to save money, I will see if we can get a 2 core server instead.

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Community Expert ,
Nov 03, 2020 Nov 03, 2020

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Glad to have helped (and thanks for marking the answer as "correct", to help others).

 

But when you say that the link for the EULA is not working, there is a solution there, either of a few.

 

So first, which "link" do you mean? I assume you don't mean the one for my blog post (which I gave above), since you refer to "searching" and getting "the same dead link". I assume you mean one of the two links I offered in that post for the PDFs of the CF2018 and 2016 EULAs, but again those came up--even with a forced browser cache clear, etc.

 

Anyway, even if somehow one of those PDFs didn't come up for you, there are still two more options. First, I also offered the link to the Adobe licensing site (https://www.adobe.com/legal/licenses-terms.html), and you can find a link to the CF EULA PDF from there. (If that didn't work, that would be odd as Adobe legal controls that and would seem to know if a link ever failed.)

 

But finally, even if NONE of those worked :-), I will note again that the first section of the blog post mentions how anyone can find the license in their installation of CF itself, in the root of the CF folder, as a license.html file. 

 

And while I realize you may not yet have installed CF (because of these concerns), note that you COULD proceed to install it (for any of many reasons) and not bother to put in a license key, in which case you will get the 30 day trial--and after that the Developer edition--until you do put in a valid license key.

 

Hope all that's helpful, for you or other readers.


/Charlie (troubleshooter, carehart.org)

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Participant ,
Nov 04, 2020 Nov 04, 2020

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Yes, the link you provided in the original response (https://coldfusion.adobe.com/2018/01/finding-the-eula-end-user-licensing-agreement-for-your-installe...) went to a page isn't working response.

I contacted the reseller you suggested (thank you!).  I got a screenshot from our IT on the core info, and the reseller confirmed we can purchase a 2 core license.

As for the costs the salesperson from Adobe quoted, that is still frustrating and misleading.  I was very clear this was for a single server, a single site, it's our department intranet, and we will not be hosting any other sites.  We do a ton of document storage, but the CF part of the site is not that complex (mostly because I am self-taught, and this is a tiny part of my actual job).  I can buy it direct from Adobe (I may need to due to our finance department) for a one-time cost of 2499 as compared to the almost 7000 a year they quoted me.

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Community Expert ,
Nov 04, 2020 Nov 04, 2020

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Thanks. So some more thoughts on all this.

First, as for the Adobe sales folks, it does indeed sound like you do NOT fit the SaaS model at all--and few running cf do, in my experience. And that's why they should NOT be trying to force an annual license. 

 

To be clear, I am agreeing this practice is wrong. And while I don't hear of it often, I want to right it when I do. I have already brought your post to the attention of someone on the cf team who agrees that this should not be happening. 

 

As for the reseller being able to help you, great. As for your finance team perhaps forcing you not to use them, not so great. That's kind of ironic that a "finance" team would forgo a 25% discount. 🙂 

 

Finally, are you saying that link STILL does not work for you? Your wording here is unclear. 🙂 The link did and does for me. Can you please try it on a different browser, or incognito/private window? I just want to know if this is somehow a unique problem for you or not. Thanks. 


/Charlie (troubleshooter, carehart.org)

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Participant ,
Nov 04, 2020 Nov 04, 2020

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Odd, my work does block sites, but I can get to the Adobe site at work.  From home, I was able to click any of the links you posted, so it seems I was being blocked at work.

 

Appreciate the help, truly.

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