The Professor
Member
Adobe recently announced that it was shutting down it's activation servers for the CS2 Creative Suite package. If you are unfamiliar, activation servers are used to verify your software serial number each time you launch an Adobe CS program while connected to the internet. Since most users will have upgraded to a newer version of the CS Suite by now anyway, it apparently was no longer considered cost effective to maintain the activation servers for CS2.
This resulted in a stir of controversy over how Adobe was going to continue to maintain any support for current CS2 Suite users since they were essentially giving up the means to verify any CS2 serial numbers in the future. To resolve the dilemma Adobe decided to put the full unrestricted version of CS2 (complete with serial number) on their website for free download with the caveat that you had to be registered with an Adobe ID in order to access the download.
This resulted in an even more controversy since not all purchasers had ever registered an Adobe ID and asking such users to do so now to continue to receive CS2 support didn't go over very well. Adobe was really just trying to "make it work" at this point so their ultimate resolution was to make CS2 an unrestricted download for anyone, an almost unprecedented move for such a major software vendor and their flagship product.
Everyone was ecstatic. And while Adobe was enjoying the universal public accolades for being "the good guys" in how they handled this word quickly spread around the internet that CS2 was now a free, unrestricted download. No doubt that Adobe was immediately hammered with a deluge of downloads for what it considered "outdated" software and (in speculation) I imagine someone took a look at this situation as "potential" CS6 sales flying right out the window (I would argue that fact).
As a result Adobe did a slight back step by adding a little disclaimer to their download page that the serial numbers provided "should only be used by customers who legitimately purchased CS2". But it's obvious the cork is out of the bottle for CS2 and cannot be put back in. Adobe considers CS2 as an outdated and unsupported version, one no longer even worth keeping track of. And one that many people who could never afford it would in fact be more than happy to get much more use out of.
To check it out replace xx in the URL here: hxxp://www.adobe.com/downloads/cs2_downloads/index.html
~TheProf
This resulted in a stir of controversy over how Adobe was going to continue to maintain any support for current CS2 Suite users since they were essentially giving up the means to verify any CS2 serial numbers in the future. To resolve the dilemma Adobe decided to put the full unrestricted version of CS2 (complete with serial number) on their website for free download with the caveat that you had to be registered with an Adobe ID in order to access the download.
This resulted in an even more controversy since not all purchasers had ever registered an Adobe ID and asking such users to do so now to continue to receive CS2 support didn't go over very well. Adobe was really just trying to "make it work" at this point so their ultimate resolution was to make CS2 an unrestricted download for anyone, an almost unprecedented move for such a major software vendor and their flagship product.
Everyone was ecstatic. And while Adobe was enjoying the universal public accolades for being "the good guys" in how they handled this word quickly spread around the internet that CS2 was now a free, unrestricted download. No doubt that Adobe was immediately hammered with a deluge of downloads for what it considered "outdated" software and (in speculation) I imagine someone took a look at this situation as "potential" CS6 sales flying right out the window (I would argue that fact).
As a result Adobe did a slight back step by adding a little disclaimer to their download page that the serial numbers provided "should only be used by customers who legitimately purchased CS2". But it's obvious the cork is out of the bottle for CS2 and cannot be put back in. Adobe considers CS2 as an outdated and unsupported version, one no longer even worth keeping track of. And one that many people who could never afford it would in fact be more than happy to get much more use out of.
To check it out replace xx in the URL here: hxxp://www.adobe.com/downloads/cs2_downloads/index.html
~TheProf
