[Originally published: Jan 2018; updated Feb 2025, Sep 2023, 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.
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 2023, it can be found at /ColdFusion2023/license.html. 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 in 2025 and 2023: I have updated this post to offer the links below for the 2025 and 2023 PDFs, respectively
Update for CF2021: I have updated this post to offer the link to the CF2021 PDF below. Also, with the release of ColdFusion 2021, note that if you may choose to use the Express or Zip installer, then the location of the license file 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.
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 it offers the currently supported CF versions (which as of this update in Sep 2023) are ColdFusion 2023 and 2021. The direct URL to it (as of now) is:
CF2023: https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/cc/en/legal/licenses-terms/pdf/Adobe_ColdFusion2025-en_US.pdf
Note that you can tell the version of the EULA you’re reading by going to the very bottom. A reference to CF2025 shows as ColdFusion16 in the footer line, while CF2023 shows as ColdFusion15, and CF2021 is ColdFusion14, and so on.
As for the CF2018 one, I could not no longer find it online, which leads to the next point.
What if you want to find the EULA for some older CF version?
That Adobe licensing page is fine for finding the latest CF versions, but what if you’re looking for the EULA for CF2018 or even CF11 or CF10, and so on? Well, you may be able to find them via your favorite search engine: coldfusion 10 eula, for instance.
But really it’s best just to look at the file on your own machine(s) for whatever current or past versions of CF you have 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. (Nor in 2025 and beyond about Adobe’s change to a subscription licensing model for CF.) 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 most forms of social media as carehart.
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As I had noted in the post here, somehow the CF2018 EULA can no longer be found online, but I have punted and just uploaded to my own site the license.html file as was found in the root of my cf2018 install folder. I offer that renamed license.html file here. It’s not a PDF like the others but again an html file: at least it allows one to view its contents if that’s helpful for comparisons, etc.
Finally, somehow in my edits of the post over time I lost track above of the CF2016 EULA. That CAN still eb found online (like the earlier ones) here:
https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/legal/licenses-terms/pdf/Adobe_ColdFusion-en_US-20151221_1720.pdf
FWIW, if you might find this URL for a EULA:
https://wwwimages.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/legal/licenses-terms/pdf/ColdFusion.pdf
That is for CF2016. As I noted in the post, the bottom line in the EULAs often had a version number, such as the “12” in this one (as of early 2024), which I noted above is for CF2016. Perhaps in time this URL may point to the “current” EULA PDF, but for now it does not.
Hi Charlie – can you point me at where I can find the CF2023 EULA – I’ve checked on the Adobe site reference above, but it only shows 2021. Thanks
Sorry that I had somehow not seen a notification about this comment/request when you made it back in May. I have since updated the post (last month) to point specifically to the cf2023 EULA.
Two other points:
- the new version’s PDF is indeed (now) pointed to by the page of EULAs that I pointed to above. I’m not too surprised if it was not there when you first asked, in the first days after the release. It could also have been a caching issue in your browser.
- as I noted above, the EULA is also in the root folder of CF if you implement it on your own machine–and even if you don’t want to “install” the new CF version for some reason, see above where I explained how CF2021 and above now offers a zip install approach, so you could just extract that zip and see the license.txt within its readme folder
I point all this out as much for future readers of this post, such as when CF2024 and other versions come out, in case I don’t update the post right away to point to that latest version’s PDF. 🙂
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