Adobe May Be Offering a Free (and Legal) Download of Creative Suite 2

adobecs2download

Here’s some potentially huge news from the photo-editing software industry today: Adobe may be giving away its older Creatie Suite 2 for free. This includes Photoshop CS2.

It may sound sketchy or like a mistake to you, but it’s found over on Adobe’s website on a page titled “CS2 Downloads.” It appears to be down at the moment (we’re getting a “Site Area Temporarily Unavailable” message), but that may be the result of hordes of people trying to snag the software at the same time.

When it was up, the page included individual download links for the entire suite and for the individual programs in the suite. You can download Photoshop by itself if you’d like.

Here’s what the download page looks/looked like (click to enlarge):

freescreen

As you can see, each of the programs is being offered alongside a universal serial number that everyone can use. The entire suite’s serial number is:

1130-0412-8377-1896-9751-5759

Photoshop CS2’s serial numbers are:

1045-0410-5403-3188-5429-0639 (Mac)
1045-1412-5685-1654-6343-1431 (Win)

Hopefully the website comes back online shortly. If you’ve been looking to dip your toes into the world of Photoshop, this would be a great way to get started on the cheap. Keep your eye on the page throughout the day!


Update: It appears that the downloads and universal serial numbers are intended for customers who need to re-install (the CS2 activation server was killed of at the end of last year).


Update: Here’s an official statement by Adobe posted on January 7th:

Effective December 13, Adobe disabled the activation server for CS2 products and Acrobat 7 because of a technical glitch. These products were released over 7 years ago and do not run on many modern operating systems. But to ensure that any customers activating those old versions can continue to use their software, we issued a serial number directly to those customers. While this might be interpreted as Adobe giving away software for free, we did it to help our customers.

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