Quark Relaxes Infamously Miserly Licensing

Adobe, Macromedia, even Microsoft per­mits installing a sin­gle copy of their soft­ware on two com­put­ers for the use of one per­son with­out addi­tion­al licens­ing fees. These “dual-system/single-user” licens­ing allows pro­fes­sion­al or pow­er users to main­tain copies of soft­ware on their work desk­top com­put­ers as well as on lap­tops or home com­put­ers for out-of-office work with­out hav­ing to pay addi­tion­al licens­ing fees. Adobe, for exam­ple, has an 80/20 licens­ing pol­i­cy: The soft­ware may be used approx­i­mate­ly eighty per­cent of the time on one com­put­er and twen­ty per­cent on anoth­er with­out requir­ing two sep­a­rate instal­la­tion licens­es. Such licens­ing poli­cies rec­og­nize that cus­tomers often per­form work on more than one system.

Unlike its peers, Quark has, to the con­ster­na­tion of thou­sands of cus­tomers, restrict­ed the instal­la­tion of QuarkXPress to a sin­gle sys­tem. If an indi­vid­ual legal, reg­is­tered QuarkXPress user need­ed to use the pro­gram on a lap­top or home sys­tem, even part-time, she was required to pony up anoth­er $75 USD for the priv­e­lage. Software acti­va­tion pro­tec­tion built into QuarkXPress 5 and 6 enforced the pol­i­cy by pre­vent­ing instal­la­tion with­out con­tact­ing Quark.

Non-concurrent dual-installations of QuarkXPress were so com­mon in cre­ative and busi­ness mar­kets that Quark cre­at­ed the Dual Licensing pro­gram, com­plete with its own F.A.Q. and doc­u­men­ta­tion. Rather than join its peers in per­mit­ting dual-system/single-user instal­la­tions of XPress, Quark cre­at­ed a sep­a­rate licens­ing pro­gram to facil­i­tate the cus­tomers’ abil­i­ty to pay Quark.

The licens­ing pol­i­cy changed last week. As of the first of July, and announced by Quark in a 6 July press release, Dual Licensing is now free of charge. Users of QuarkXPress may now install a sec­ond copy of the prod­uct for mobile or home use with­out the $75 USD charge on top of the ini­tial $945 prod­uct price.

The pri­ma­ry, reg­is­tered user of a QuarkXPress 6 single-user soft­ware license can now install, acti­vate, and use the soft­ware on two com­put­ers. The new pol­i­cy per­mits non-concurrent use of the soft­ware on two sys­tems, which must be on the same platform.

”Quark is com­plete­ly com­mit­ted to improv­ing our cus­tomer ser­vice. This is one of the many ways that we’re active­ly respond­ing to cus­tomer requests and try­ing to help our cus­tomers be more effi­cient,” said Monique Wirz-Grutter, Quark’s vice pres­i­dent of oper­a­tions. “Whether you trav­el across the globe or sim­ply want to work at home, you will always have con­ve­nient access to QuarkXPress, the industry-leading design and lay­out software.”

The dual licens­ing pol­i­cy replaces the Quark Mobile Licensing pro­gram. Customers who pur­chased a Quark Mobile License can request a coupon that will apply to the pur­chase of Quark soft­ware or services.

The Dual Licensing and relat­ed doc­u­men­ta­tion at Quark​.com hasn’t yet been updat­ed to reflect the now week-old change in policy.