Award Sounds Music, Photography & Consultancy

I hate the idea of restrictive licenses or rather I hate inconclusive or hidden license restrictions.

I know some people have issues with license practices by large organisations, I sometimes have issues with them as well, usually I try to find out as much as I can before I buy the license. Doesn't always work out rosy for me either. I'm positive I've managed to circumvent a few issues by going with a different vendor. In the case of the Adobe license for Lightroom, I quite like the fact that they're open about what it means before you purchase it. I also like how the software can be installed on a workstation and a portable at the same time as long as you only use it on one of them at any given time. As a professional user, that means I can buy the software once rather than having to pay for two installs. One in the office and one for a home portable. Makes sense to me.

I noticed this the other day when I was in Cornwall. I had some photos that I'd taken on a shoot of the coast that day and had to resort to using iPhoto (or Finder and Preview) to be able to view the photos. If I'd purchased Lightroom, I'd have been able to use that software in Cornwall. Nice coast by the way.

Bibble Labs start off on the right track mentioning support for licenses across platforms but there are some odd restrictions. As to be expected, only the Pro version is applicable across platforms. The other restriction prevents me from purchasing it, since you can only install once for each of the support platforms. In this case the platforms are the Operating Systems of Linux, Windows and OS X. Hence you can only use a single license on multiple computers if the computers also have different Operating Systems. That's not good for me. I'm curious if that's what Bibble Labs wanted the license to say.

Lightzone. Seems inconsistent. When I first downloaded the trial, the license allowed for dual-install, e.g. on workstation and laptop. Now there's no mention of that on the site or the support site. The original FAQs that I based this on are cached courtesy of Google.

After a good look on Apple's website I can't find an answer to Aperture's license. I also can't remember seeing anything relevant on the recent trial install, although trial licenses may not reflect the actual license. Looks like I'll have to ring Apple's support number to find out more information. Will post back with more details.

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