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That was an excellent summary of Adobe's software giveaway.

Are you sure that the replacement serial numbers are individualized? When I tried googling, some of my replacement serial numbers are found on the web, some aren't. This seems to suggest that they are not individualized -- at least for some product & platform combinations.

My own theory about the motivation of the original giveaway is that they lost the ability to generate new licenses for those old versions, so they made it free. A comment[1] from 3 years ago:

How could they lose the ability to create licenses? I can think of many scenarios: The one server that ran the legacy license code crashed, and they had no backups. Or they lost the database of who had which product and serial number, so there was no way to verify anything when someone needed to reactivite an old product or move their license to a different system. Or there was a new bug or incompatibility in their license generator, perhaps due to a server upgrade, but the source code for the licensing software was lost so there was no way to rebuild it.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15732354

> But are you sure that the replacement serial numbers are individualized?

Just an assumption because I have two legit OS X CS3 Master Collection serials, got two different replacement offline serials for them, and those serials don't work for the Windows version just like the originals didn't v(._. )v

Well, that could easily still be the case if there was one code for Windows and one for OS X.

At least two for OS X, since GP had two.

I believe for the CS2 versions they released the mac serials were also different from the windows versions, and each product had its own serial.

Oh dear, thank you so very much genuinely for your excellent history. Unfortunately I think this is going to leave me with the loss, since I last backed up my design workstation to tape conveniently the just far enough distant past and (dealing with long-term injury that I am only recently overcome sufficiently for picking up my WACOM pen again) only the last month or so have been planning on restoring.

Completely seriously, isn't Adobe missing out on a significant community of graying designers who would be entirely contented to pay Adobe quintennially for a long term support version with standard menus and hardened fuzzed etc security wash before rtm?

Priced at say 60 percent of the current subscription, and given the opportunity for satisfying this constituency of customers who I am not sure at all would be Adobe customers in the future otherwise, isn't even such a radical branch viable?

I’ve noticed a few companies seemingly pricing things higher than you’d think was sensible (the one that struck me recently is Contentful, who’s pricing tiers quickly jump up to “far too expensive for a small company”)... my assumption is they’ve made a decision that they are better served going after the customers who can pay more and leaving the rest to the competitors.

I guess maybe this is based on projections about whether (in Adobe’s case) those customers unwilling to pay a subscription are likely to ever buy upgrades, maybe also it’s easier to focus on pleasing a smaller number of more “committed” customers? Not sure really, I’d be interested to read more.

But it’s probably a conscious decision on their part, unfortunately, so I doubt we’ll ever see “one off” purchase software from Adobe again.

I do pay for their Photography package (Lightroom, Photoshop and cloud storage) and actually the cloud storage and iOS versions of Lightroom make it worthwhile for me. I occasionally need a vector editor and would probably pay another £5-10/month for Illustrator, but instead I’d have to jump to paying for full CC, so I use Affinity Designer instead!

Affinity Designer is my best purchase this year. I don't need to use my graphics editor every single week or month, and it does not make any sense to pay Adobe on a subscription basis.

Affinity looks like the most promising replacement for Adobe applications like Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.

The Affinity applications get a lot of things right, and do some things better than Adobe already. And obviously the pricing and permanent sale model are much more attractive than Adobe's subscription model.

They do also have some almost unbelievable limitations, where what you'd expect to be entry-level functionality simply doesn't exist, and they lack any sort of plug-in ecosystem and all the extensibility and customisation that brings.

But saying that, it's not as if Adobe's applications haven't had bizarre omissions over the years, and they've had much longer to fix them. Hopefully Serif can keep up the momentum and community good will it's built for the Affinity suite and in time they'll close the gaps.

>They do also have some almost unbelievable limitations, where what you'd expect to be entry-level functionality simply doesn't exist

Are there any specific examples that come to mind? I recently heard about Afinity and am planning to give it a try next time I need a Photoshop or Illustrator replacement.

It's mostly just dumb little things. You can transform elements using exact numerical values in some contexts, but sometimes you just get a drag handle and can't be precise. You can put tables in a document as standalone frames, but you can't include them within your text story so they reflow properly. This is basic stuff for graphics and DTP software respectively, yet Affinity can't do them.

But then again, for a very long time very basic search and replace options were missing in InDesign, so as I said before, it's not as if Adobe's software hasn't had its share of bizarre limitations over the years as well.

Same. But I switched because I felt that Adobe got very abusive with customers that paid for a $2,000 and had the misfortune of having a serial number tied up in a crashed machine that wasn't deactivated. The interrogations and scoldings were ridiculous. The lack of an online deactivation instead of having to call every time was annoying as hell too. For a company like that, the subscription model was a "no deal" because then they'd have zero incentive to improve. I don't miss Adobe at all.

I believe part of this is because Dolby is suing Adobe, saying they mandate certain pricing requirements in the license agreements, and so Adobe has responded by pulling old versions of their software with support for Dolby file formats.

[0] https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6002319/Dolbyvsad...

I think in the latest iteration of Media Encoder it can no longer accept MKV containers.... I'm wondering if it was also tied to some license issue.

Huh, but MKV is Matroska, and it's a free-to-use open standard...

Don't expect a non-free software company to understand the difference between a media container and bitstream codec.

> For CS2, they offered Activation-free replacement installers and generic serial numbers on their support page.

This is the only reasonable way it should be done with old software.

> This resulted in a bunch of press about it being a omg completely free Creative Suite

Just write it in bold - something like "it's not free, you are only eligible if you have purchased a license". Whoever wants to pirate will pirate anyway

> they gave everything a shiny new Flash-based UI in CS

Flash?? Seriously?

We're talking about CS4 here: Flash was basically THE way to build UI back then. I wouldn't be surprised if it was one of the motivating factors for Adobe buying out Macromedia (aside from just quashing potential competition from Macromedia Studio).

Hell, a lot of high-budget video games around the same time used a little thing called Autodesk Scaleform. That's basically Autodesk's reimplementation of Flash Player (Adobe was too short-sighted to pursue this market) which game developers could quite easily license and embed into their games.

The wonderful pseudo-3D HUD on tye Crysis franchise is made with Scaleform. It's deprecated, and AFAIK, CryEngine doesn't use it anymore, but it made the best GUIs back then.

THE way to build a UI that worked and looked consistently across platforms at the time as well. It was a great time! Even now it still takes some work to achieve the same!

Flash?? Seriously?

I'll be damned if I can find a reference, but it's definitely a “non-native” UI, probably using Adobe AIR.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_AIR

Flash is still used in animation and other bits, despite its web presence disappearing

Is there a reliable way to view flash files without a browser then? I'm concerned about loosing the ability to occasionally view some flash (games etc) after Chrome removes Flash support this december. And people (I have quite a number of friends who do) already have to use old Windows systems with Internet Explorer to use the Flash app to apply to the US DV lottery (Chrome just offers to save it instead of running it).

Flash Player works as a standalone app iirc.

https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/

Specifically, you need to get the "projector" from this page: https://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/debug_downloads.ht...

Flash is cool and very good at certain things. I just prefer a more native-feeling UI.

Do you still have those installers, and if so, would you be able to post checksums of them?

https://pastebin.pl/view/aaa0ecc7

Thank you!

Thank you for this timeline. I was trying to figure out what had happened to the CS2/CS3 pages and downloads a bit ago and there was no info!