Adobe Rant

Until this weekend I had a fairly positive view of Adobe Software. Sure, I'd get pissed that they didn't implement nested folders or multi-layer selection until photoshop 9, but overall I've been very happy with their products. That is, until I setup a mirrored RAID on my G5.

Earlier this year, when Adobe CS2 was released, it had a new copyright feature. The new feature requires that the product be activated before it can run. This "feature" makes a lot of sense for Adobe because it prevents multiple installations using the same serial number. In principle, this doesn't harm a legitimate user of their software. However, it runs into a VERY important problem. One that is not too dissimilar to a problem with Apple's DRM, FairPlay.

The problem is DE-activation. To use the software on another computer, or more specifically, a hard drive, you must deactivate the previous installation. Not such a big deal, right? But wait. Say your hard drive fails. You can't deactivate anything! Backed up drives won't allow CS2 to be activated because the activation is associated with the broken drive. At a time of high vulnerability, Adobe decides to treat you like a thief. Nice.

Luckily, my hard drive hasn't failed - Yet. After hearing about David's tragedy, I decided I needed to get a real backup system in place. Hence my desire to setup a mirrored RAID and backup drive. It was during the process of backing up and erasing hard drives to set up the RAID that I found out about this activation problem. I'm glad that I recognized the need to deactive the software before I erased and reinstalled my hard drive, but their is no way to protect my activation against future disk failure. Adobe, you suck.