[originally published on Jan 2018, updated Jan 2021]

Do you know how to quickly and easily find the EULA (End User Licensing Agreement) for your installed ColdFusion version?

Sure, you can search for and find one online (I show links to those below), but did you know it’s actually available as a file right in your installed CF instance?

Frequently when people want to consider, discuss, debate, or simply confirm the terms of the EULA for a given version, they resort to searching the web, where they may find some PDF (from Adobe or otherwise, and perhaps not for your version). That can be useful, but there are some things to beware. I will discuss both options here, starting with the one “you agreed to”, which is the one in your CF folder.

1) Finding the EULA within your CF installation

If your focus is to know the terms of the EULA for the ColdFusion version you have installed, then the best place to look is in your CF installation itself, where it’s placed as an HTML file in the root of your CF directory.

For instance, in ColdFusion 2018, it can be found at /ColdFusion2018/license.html. For ColdFusion 11, it’s at /ColdFusion11/license.html, and so on. I find that many people never realize the EULA is there, so for some folks, that’s all they need to know and can stop here.

Update for CF2021: with the release of ColdFusion 2021, I wanted to update the post to point out that if you may choose to use the Express or Zip installer, then the location is a bit different. It ends up in the ColdFusion\Readme\en folder as a file called license.txt–but it’s the same license as the one implemented in the root of a CF2021 instance as created by the full GUI installer.

2) Finding the latest official Adobe EULA online

Of course, if you want to find the EULA for a version OTHER than what you have installed (such as to contemplate how a newer version you are considering may have changed), you can’t look for that in your own installation directory. But you can find the CF EULAs online, in which case there are additional thoughts to consider.

First and foremost, for the latest current CF version, you should be aware that the formal Adobe location for all product licenses is this page:

http://www.adobe.com/legal/licenses-terms.html

CF is offered in the list of products, and as of this update (Nov 2020) the ColdFusion 2021 EULA is offered there. The direct URL to it (as of now) is:

https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/cc/en/legal/licenses-terms/pdf/Adobe_ColdFusion2021-en_US-20201111.pdf

Note that you can tell the version by going to the very bottom. A reference to CF2021 shows ColdFusion14 in the footer line, while CF2016 would show ColdFusion12, and so on.

As for the CF2018 one, I’m not finding it online readily, but I have compared the versions I have in my local CF installs, and they have only a couple of minor differences (none related to cores, cpus, vms, testing/staging, or things like that). But do look at your own copy of the ColdFusion 2018 EULA and/or do a comparison if you are concerned.

And here is the ColdFusion 2016 eula, again as I’d linked to when this post was first offered in Jan 2018 (and it still works, in Nov 2020):

http://wwwimages.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/legal/licenses-terms/pdf/ColdFusion-2016.pdf

Note that the CF2016 PDF as downloaded will render as being 27 pages. That may make it seem a daunting read, but if you look carefully, you will see that only the first 11 pages are in English. (That’s not the case with the license.html file in a CF2016 installation, which shows only the language used for CF installation.)

3) What if you want to find the EULA for some older CF version?

That Adobe licensing page is fine for finding the latest CF version, but what if you’re looking for the EULA for CF11, CF10, and so on, such as for some comparison? Well, you can of course use your favorite search engine, and you may luck out if you google: coldfusion eula, for instance.

But here is the one for CF11:

https://wwwimages.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/legal/licenses-terms/pdf/Adobe_ColdFusion-Multi-20140214_1311.pdf

And for CF10:

https://wwwimages.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/legal/licenses-terms/pdf/Adobe%20ColdFusion%C2%AE%2010.pdf

Some cautions about finding EULAs online

First, note again that there is a license version number at the bottom of the license, which may be important to pay attention to.

Second, be cautious about taking links that go to sites other than Adobe, as a EULA you find from somewhere may not be exactly the same as the official one.

Third, you can’t even trust all links you may find to CF EULAs on Adobe’s site. Among the top Google results for the “coldfusion eula” search above showed links (in 2018) that were technically going to labs.adobe.com. That’s an old site where beta releases of some previous CF versions were offered, and the EULA offered there would be relevant only for that beta release! (And this is just one more reason not to trust PDFs found on other sites, as those could have been obtained from the labs site, for instance.)

Again, best to just look at the file on your own server(s) where you may have the current or had past versions of CF installed.

I hope all that is helpful.

Before concluding, I would like to add that this post is simply on the matter of *finding* the EULA. Let’s please not engage here in comments about the TERMS of the EULA, or how it’s changed between releases, etc. This is just not the place for that. You can create your own discussion or blog post to debate/discuss that. 🙂

For more blog posts from Charlie Arehart, see his posts here as well as his posts at carehart.org. And follow him on Twitter and other social media as carehart.