Tuesday, 18 February 2014

I might not be, but Gavin is...

A few days back I got a bit shouty about not being a dead CF installer storage facility: "Things I am not...".

Gavin, who is a much nicer person than I am, has - instead of just complaining about stuff like I do - done something about it, as detailed here: "CFML Server - A Different type of ColdFusion Repo - ColdFusion Installs". Gavin has created an online repository (via copy.com), of old ColdFusion installer files. He's got a range of installs for various versions back to ColdFusion 5, as well as a mix of operating systems and bitness (what's the technical term to describe the concept like "32-bit" or "64-bit"?) of the OS architecture.

So this'll be handy. I have a bunch of old installers on my machine at home, so I'll make sure he's got all those ones too. But I won't be home for another coupla weeks.

Gavin also points to a blog article from David Epler: "Last day to download CF 8 and 9 from Adobe with Verity". He's got links for all the various versions of ColdFusion 8 & 9 (OSes and bitnesses), straight from the Adobe site.

A line of discussion did come up on Twitter when I was chatting about this, questioning the legality of providing the installers of ColdFusion which ship with Verity. Verity got subsumed by Autonomy a few years back, and Verity no longer exists as a product. Accordingly Adobe could no longer licence it, so it needed to be removed from ColdFusion (don't quote me on the legal minutiae of this, IANAL, etc). Anyway, as far as I can assess this, that's Adobe's problem, not ours. So there is no problem with storing installers of ColdFusion independent of Adobe. Equally, there is no problem using these versions of ColdFusion, provided you have a valid licence for them (eg: a ColdFusion 8 licence, or just opt for "developer licence" when installing).

It goes without saying that by facilitating the download of these files does not in any way provide a licence to use said software. You need your own licences.

Not wanting to encourage legally questionable behaviour (in case it is legally questionable, which I don't think it is), I have asked Adobe for clarification:

I have, as yet, received no response. So as far as I'm concerned we are all acting in good faith.

Anyway, cheers to Gavin for doing something helpful with this, and cheers (belatedly) to David for doing fine detective work here.

And if any one has any old ColdFusion (or, hey, old Cold Fusion ~) installers Gavin doesn't have, let him know.

Oh... one last thing... keep a hold of the installers of the software you run! You shouldn't need to be asking other people for this sort of thing, really. So go track down the installers of all the software you run now, and put them somewhere safe.