Adobe officially does not support permanent licenses

[IsleofGough]

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.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

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.

[IsleofGough]

The official reply from Anand from the Adobe team is that they can not reset activation limits even with proof of ownership if you sign out and reformat your hard drive. Email was from 4/21/2025.

[frameexpert]

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.

[IsleofGough]

Unfortunately, Adobe tech support also does not understand FM itself. Anand and others said that under Framemaker 2019 help is an option to "deactivate". That actually does not exist (see attachment). There is an options to sign out, which I did before wiping the computer and an option to "manage my account" that has nothing about deactivating FM.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Was FM installed as part of the TCS? IIRC that "Deactivate" option appears only in one of the products when installed as a Suite.

[IsleofGough]

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.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

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

[IsleofGough]

The messaging is blocked as I tried copy and pasting the emails and it had an html link (with incorrect instructions). Messages don't allow html links apparently. Resendng with the link removed gave me the message that I had exceeded the messages allowed, unfortunately.

[IsleofGough]

Adobe closed the case, saying even though I signed out that they cannot access their own server. They do not consider perpetual licenses permanent.

[IsleofGough · Accepted solution]

Lalit from Adobe gave me a new serial number, so I am very happy. He did say that access to the activation server will disappear soon.

[cielomedia · Accepted solution]

They transferred me a bunch and said the same thing, they did remote work and just said server that recognizes licenses is no longer supported and they can't do anything about it and kept pushing for me to get a cloud subscription. After a lot of research I was able to get instructions that worked and let me install on my new computer without it still saying I was out of licenses even after deactivating on the old one. Key is you still need access to your old computer. You just need to run the adobe clean up tool after downloading, follow the directions to delete all adoble credentials. That worked. You can't just run the credentials manager on windows, I did and it didn't recognize any adobe credentials at all, it just only running the clean up tool and selecting to clean off all credentials that it let me finally reinstall on my computre. So it wasn't a server not in service issue as they kept telling me. It was a glitch with my computer not fully deactivating even when I followed the usually deactivate path from the menu. 

[Jeff_Coatsworth · Accepted solution]

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.