Angela wrote:So why don't all the professional Flash developers buy the academically-licensed Flash8 professional for 25% of the price? Are they relying on customer honesty or does Adobe go around checking on people? If they don't check what is the point of multiple licenses in the first place? Are they relying on retailers to check student cards for this to work? How do they check if people are using pirated versions?
Well, to buy the academic version, you're supposed to show proof that you're in academia, in the form of a student ID or something of the like, and most retailers are very strict about checking as all of the boxes for the software are labeled "MUST HAVE STUDENT ID" on them, at least in America. I don't believe Adobe would waste very much energy actually tracking down people using the same software for school as work, but if you were to personally be audited by the IRS (US Internal Revenue Service), for example, and found to be using academically licensed software, that could end up being a pretty big legal problem.
Software licensing on a whole is mostly based on the good of people to follow them. Of course, there will always be people that pirate software, either because they can't afford the software, the thrill of the hack, or because they're simply too cheap to pay the few bucks most software titles cost. That's lead some companies to using activation schemes where the software reports back to the company to register itself, but this is actually not very common (and only Microsoft Windows and a few Adobe products and a few other very high end professional software applications do this). Sometimes software also comes with a dongle you have to plug into your computer to verify you actually bought the software (but you only see this with hugely high-end applications, for example 3D Studio Max used to use a licensing system like this).
But in the end, if you're a teacher, using academically licensed software to create teaching materials, I don't see it as much of a problem. I don't think any of Adobe's licenses infringes on your right to commercialize anything made with any of their software, such as selling a flash-based game or Chumby widget, but your own version of the IRS might not like it if you have a side-business using the same license (though you could probably argue it either way). Giving them away for free would be completely fine though.