Hundred of pounds worth of free Photoshop giveaways from Adobe. Well sort of. This link has been floating around the internet http://www.adobe.com/downloads/cs2_downloads/index.html and at first glimpse looks like a late Christmas present for the masses.
What has happened is this. Adobe have decided that the activation servers for CS2, which support legitimate copies, are going to be switched off. Seeing as Adobe love their paying customers so much they tried to hide a download page with links to software and serial numbers. Unfortunately for Adobe the blogosphere is fast and the page is now out there for anyone to download this eight year old bit of software. Adobe made this statement:
You have heard wrong! Adobe is absolutely not providing free copies of CS2!
What is true is that Adobe is terminating the activation servers for CS2 and that for existing licensed users of CS2 who need to reinstall their software, copies of CS2 that don’t require activation but do require valid serial numbers are available. (Special serial numbers are provided on the page for each product download.)
You are only legally entitled to download and install with that serial number if you have a valid license to the product!
Make of that what you will, but if Adobe are going to publish a link to software downloads next to a serial number then they are either extremely naive or extremely savvy. There are a few caveats though. these files only work on PowerPC Macs (or Intels that run Rosetta – so up to OSX 10.6) and there might be issues with Windows 8 (I run CS2 on a Windows 7 PC, and it seems to be okay).
The upshot is that if you have a system that can run it, and you want a copy that Adobe does not need to activate – Then download away! Photoshop CS2 is still a brilliant bit of software with more functionality than most people will ever need, or use (with the notable exception of the newer content-aware stuff).