Earlier today, the #adobe MacAdmins Slack channel was awoken from it’s afternoon/morning slumber with the following message:

Shortly afterwards, I myself, along with other Adobe customers received the same email that can be found here

What does it mean?

Adobe have informed its customers that certain versions of certain Adobe applications are not longer part of any license. If you continue to use these unauthorised versions, you run the risk of claims of infringement by third parties.

Adobe have requested that you update or remove & upgrade (depending on how far behind you are) any unauthorised versions of software you have in your fleet. They also request you delete and (if possible) recreate any deployment installers for the affected versions.

Finally, Adobe will now only offer the latest two releases for applications via their packaging tools and the Creative Cloud Desktop App.

Which applications are these?

Adobe provided the below table:

As mentioned in the #adobe channel, the Product Versions do not match the Creative Cloud Marketing versions they ship with!

Take Photoshop, for example:

Photoshop version 20.x is from Adobe Creative Cloud 2019

Photoshop version 19.x is from Adobe Creative Cloud 2018

Patrick Fergus (@foigus) made a brilliant new table with the Official Marketing names as well as the applications numbers which should help Admins:

I annotated Adobe’s “authorized” applications table with “marketing” versions. Note “if an Adobe product is not listed in the table below, all versions continue to be authorized.”https://t.co/4re491pjUc pic.twitter.com/av8NY0KTzT — Patrick Fergus (@foigus) May 8, 2019

Why?

At this point Adobe haven’t specified why this new requirement has come about. There was an incident a few years ago where they lost a case around Dolby Labs’ copyrighted materials (link) but this doesn’t seem related.

It could be to do with the new Java requirements announced by Oracle earlier this year, since a number of the Adobe products have in the past utilised the local Java runtime.

At this point in time, who knows?

Credit

Credit goes to Eric Holtam and Parick Fergus along with everyone else in #adobe who shared and discussed the above!

Summary

This post covers the changes Adobe announced earlier today in regards to older versions of their Applications. As always, if you have any questions, queries or comments, let me know below (or @daz_wallace on Mac Admins Slack) and I’ll try to respond to and delve into as many as I can.

The usual Disclaimer:

While the author has taken care to provide our readers with accurate information, please use your discretion before acting upon information based on the blog post. I will not compensate you in any way whatsoever if you ever happen to suffer a loss/inconvenience/damage because of/while making use of information in this blog.