New i1Profiler EULA

[Wayne Fox]

After reading all the comments and pondering the EULA, I wonder if x-Rite is sort of stuck in time when nearly ever user needed to profile their printers to get good quality.  A lot of opportunity for making money by providing profiling services and thus the software makers trying to get what they feel is their fair share of this.  I can remember websites with hundreds of profiles available for download for a fee.

With the consistency of current printers, manufacturers profiles very often provide more than adequate results for most users.  While some still make some income from profile creation, it just isn't the same anymore, and as mentioned by many with this EULA it's really hard to figure out when you might have crossed their line and owe them some more money (and in fact probably impossible for xRite to actually police).  They may be better served and make more money focusing on aggressive pricing and marketing and just selling more software packages, and just quit worrying that someone might make a few bucks creating a profile for someone else.

[Rhossydd]

remote profiling is a pain in the ass, and does a great disservice to everyone involved, except when trained end-users are the ones getting the profiles. People need that training in addition to the profiles. If you don't give them that training bad things happen. .......
........... When I have made exceptions to my rule about only working with existing clients, I've been flooded with support emails from these people. "Prints from your profile don't look like my monitor" because they aren't calibrating their displays correctly or using good lighting, "Prints from your profile look too good, can you desaturate your profiles?" because they're used to over-saturating their files to compensate for their previously poorly color managed printing process, etc. Or worse yet, they continue to get poor results and don't bother to tell the remote profiling service provider at all. You get the idea.

I don't agree at all that remote profiling does any disservice to end clients at all. I also think it’s pretty insulting to the majority of remote profiling customers to suggest they can’t use custom printer profiles without being trained by the profiler.
Maybe if you’re finding running a remote profiling service a “pain in the ass” you’re getting your approach wrong or have unrealistic expectations of how this service actually works in practice. I don’t think anyone can make a living from solely providing this service, these services end up being a supplementary offering from bigger businesses ensuring that their capital investments in CM get better utilisation.

I've been running a remote profiling service for about ten years now and at least 95% of my clients are delighted with the profiles and service they get from us and present no undue support burden to us. Most of the remaining 5% might need an extra email exchange to sort out any misunderstandings and usage problems, but only a tiny minority need more than a couple of emails to fully resolve their issues.
Despite offering a money back guarantee for anyone unsatisfied with their profile, no one has ever asked for a refund.

Our service is targeted at individual photographers, rather than print shops and higher end clients and most know exactly what they want and how to use the profiles correctly. I'd also guess that most wouldn't spend the extra involved with on-site consultations as a significant number live in remote locations where the costs of on-site visits would be totally uneconomic. It’s these small scale clients that will loose out if X-Rite try to eliminate remote profiling services or charge licence fees that make the profiles prohibitively expensive.

I can't understand why X-Rite would try to shut down small profiling businesses at all. I very much doubt that our profiling business has any negative effect on X-Rite’s sales, probably the reverse. Often our clients go on to invest in more and better CM hardware like monitor calibrators and some I'm sure go on to invest in printer profiling kit of their own having seen the advantages of custom profiles on their own systems.

Paul

[MHMG]

I do sympathize with Xrite, but IMHO, the Xrite marketing guys have apparently not thought it out to its ultimate conclusion. The resistance which impedes Xrite from selling more color measuring instruments and more profile generation software copies is this overall mess that is loosely call "Color management".  Get rid of the complexities and pitfalls and many more customers would likely buy instruments and happily control their processes with much greater effectiveness. But right now, every time CM starts to get a little easier, some big change (or screw up) in printer drivers, new OS versions, media inconsistencies, display technologies, etc, etc., and overall lack of industry standardization sends everyone scurrying back to the starting line or trying to find a new "work around".  This situation may represent job security for a few gifted color management consultants, but it's hell on the overall adoption rate of color managed workflows in the photographic and printing industries.  Meanwhile, "Cloud computing" is rapidly entering the implementation phase which means some bright marketing guys at every company from Microsoft on down are going to propose a whole new paradigm for charging us for software functionality. If, for example, Xrite really wanted to eliminate remote profiling businesses and capture a fee for every custom profile generated they should have simply put their new profiling engine on an Xrite server and handed out a free Ipad app or the like that lets us upload our data from our Xrite color gismos to their secret sauce application in the cloud.  A perfect example today is Dragon's Ipad dictation app. It works like a charm, but your iPad isn't doing the speech to text translation.  A company controlled and operated server does it, so you have to have an internet connection, and Dragon now has total access to every word you speak. If I were paranoid, I'd really be paranoid about cloud computing. But my point is simple, cloud computing is the perfect way to transition from the current software purchasing model to a new "click charge" model of pricing.  Microsoft could charge a small toll fee for every page we author in Word, Dragon for every word we translate, Adobe for every image we edit. But that said, the proponents of the new cloud computing paradigms should be careful what they would wish for.  For every power user who used to pay for one copy of Microsoft Word and then authored thousands of pages per year with his single software copy of Word, others of us paid the same fee, and we only write a few pages per year. Thus, cloud computing will allow every software company to track every last ounce of use and charge for it accordingly, but they may just be surprised at how many copies of software they used to sell for which very little work product actually got made with it.  Most software companies actively seek to prevent all aspects of pirated software and other forms of abuse that hurts their bottom line, but do these companies have market data on how many legitimate copies are being underutilized by the customer? On this point, I would further add that generic profiles rather than custom profiles are probably Xrite's biggest leak in their boat. Even when they get the big OEM printer and paper companies to pony up 50K or whatever for the right to mass distribute a few dozen profiles, it probably doesn't make up for the revenue that would have come in if custom profiles were being made instead, new Xrite Eula or not.

cheers,
Mark

[Jeremiah Hetté]

This is rediculous and doubt it would stand in any EU court. We'll sell you a hammer, but you can only use it on your own house! We'll sell you a car but you cant use it to give people rides for pay! Silly!

[rasworth]

Has anybody who applied for an extended agreement with X-Rite received anything back?  I haven't.

Richard Southworth

[digitaldog]

Has anybody who applied for an extended agreement with X-Rite received anything back?  I haven't.

I made a requests and heard nothing other than it was being passed onto another person in the company.

[Czornyj]

Has anybody who applied for an extended agreement with X-Rite received anything back?  I haven't.

Richard Southworth

I made a requests and heard nothing other than it was being passed onto another person in the company.

Catch 22

[djoy]

Very disappointing.

But not at all surprising, given X-Rite's history of this kind of thing.

• first release of Color Munki could only be installed 3 times (public outcry overturned this one)
• Profilemaker Pro 5 renamed Profilemaker Platinum and old package discontinued
• (now legacy) Profilemaker Pro 5 not eligible for upgrade to i1Profiler (public outcry overturned this one)
• i1Profiler EULA :
  
  • restricts usage to 50 profiles/year for non-personal use
  • grants invasive audit rights to X-Rite
  • supersedes EULA for separate products
  • restricts usage for clients to on-site only, no electronic communications allowed
  • bans remote profiling services

The revised EULA seems to have addressed only one of the above concerns, you can now email/telephone your customers. Big Whoop.

Chance of me upgrading Profilemaker to i1Profiler with this (revised) EULA = zero.

Regrettably it seems my profiling will continue to be done with PM5, until such time as a viable alternative can be found, shame, I'd been looking forward to using the new package. I was very seriously looking at the purchase of an iSis specifically because it would make volume (remote) profiling so much easier, for lower volume non-remote profiling time is not such an issue and the iO is fine, so not only is the i1Profiler purchase shelved, so is the iSis. Whilst X-Rite may not care about just little ole me, I'm sure I'm not alone. Maybe X-Rite don't care about any of us, certainly seems that way judging by the contempt with which these EULA's have been written.

Whichever way you cut it, this is a marketing FAIL, as someone pointed out, you can't sell someone a hammer and then tell them what kind of nail they're allowed to hit with it. 

[Rhossydd]

I'm sure I'm not alone.

You're not, another isis sale lost here.

[pfigen]

DJOY,

I've read the new agreement at least half a dozen time, and although I still have major problems with it, it did get rid of the 50 profile limit and the superseding of previous licenses, unless they've revised it a third time. The remote profiling language is still ambiguous at best and the auditing clause is pure b.s. I'm in no hurry to upgrade what ain't broken in the first place.