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IsleofGough
IsleofGough
Known Participant
April 23, 2025
Answered

Adobe officially does not support permanent licenses

  • April 23, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 1485 views

After two chats, a phone call, and two emails with the technical document tech support branch, I've learned that signing out of framemaker and reformatting your hard drive will not reset activations and Adobe will not help with resetting the activations. They feel that a perpetual license is not perpetual and offer to solution other than purchasing a rental version that seldom is updated.

    Correct answer Jeff_Coatsworth

    I've had a long conversation with them over this issue.
    Yes, you are correct that if you are able to deactivate or clear all credentials off your old machine, then you should be able to activate old versions still on new machines (subject of course, to the new machines being able to run your old version(s) in a new environment).
    However, what you can't do anymore is when you have failed to deactivate/clear the old machine and have run out of activations, the FM folks are now unable to access those old activation servers and reset your count (like they used to be able to do before).
    Now you're screwed - even the ability to generate a new (old version) serial number (as what happened to @IsleofGough) doesn't work anymore. Your only option at that point is to go subscription based and get the latest version.

    1 reply

    Jeff_Coatsworth
    Jeff_Coatsworth
    Community Expert
    April 23, 2025

    Your title is a bit misleading - your complaint is that FM Support seems to no longer be able to reset activation limits on perpetual licensed copies of FM.
    But until we hear from somebody on the Adobe team (maybe @Stefan Gentz can find out), nothing is "official" here.
    Standard practice has been to de-activate FM first on old machines before reinstalling and activating on a new one, but crashes do happen & the FM team have generally been happy (when presented with proof of ownership) to reset these activation limits for people that reach out to them.

      frameexpert
      frameexpert
      Community Expert
      April 23, 2025

      I am not sure how much more "official" you can get. @IsleofGough presumably heard from the Adobe team and he is reporting what they told him. I think the warning here is to make sure you deactivate before reformatting a hard drive or setting up a new computer. Whether the Adobe team responds here or not, I appreciate @IsleofGough's post.

        Jeff_Coatsworth
        Jeff_Coatsworth
        Community Expert
        April 24, 2025

        FM 2017 and 2019 were installed as single products. Over a decade ago, I used Robohelp, and before that, there was some other HELP-based program bundled with FM. But I moved most of the web-based creation to Flare (up to the last non-rental version) and epub creation to Oxygen XML (for mostly DITA and Docbook creation). As with many people on this forum, I have a lot of legacy FM documents in structured or unstructured forms, and I was still using FM for print-based long documents. I have used LaTeX for that as well, but it is quicker to work in FrameMaker. At one time, FM was rock stable and the best available program for long technical documents. With the exception of two motherboard crashes, I have always signed out and erased FM before switching to a new computer. This is the first time that Adobe refused to help.


        Can you send me the email you got from them? Shoot me a message via PM.

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