Adobe is offering many of their CS2 software for free for PC and Mac. | Hacker News Reader

Adobe is offering many of their CS2 software for free for PC and Mac.

adobe.com

63 pointsgovindreddy40 comments

Makes sense - people who would actually pay for Adobe software probably wouldn't settle for a free 6-7 year-old version, and people who wouldn't pay for Photoshop anyhow will use the free versions, meaning (a) it's now really hard to be "the cheaper Photoshop" if you're a competitor, and (b) once the guys using the free CS2 can afford to buy this sort of software, they'll probably get CS6 instead of a competitor because they're more familiar with it.

It's also a good way to fight piracy, since so many people currently learn Adobe's products on pirate copies.

I think Adobe kind of want people to do that

Also see the big lack of competition in that area (for professional use, I mean).

There's AI and CorelDraw, Inkscape is "good enough" for home use but it barely registers

There's PS, some other apps like Pixelmator, Gimp, etc, but PS is the most used

And then there's InDesign. CorelDraw can do some of its work, still...

I've seen this linked on other sites I use, but what is unclear is if we're meant to have access to this.

It would be nice to see a notice from Adobe announcing this as freely available to the public.

I'm just uncomfortable with the fact that this potentially could be some individual's screw up and that for all intents and purposes we're pirating it (since there is no licence).

May be a fair concern, I'm getting a "We're sorry, the site area you've requested is unavailable. Please try again later." error page now.

>I'm just uncomfortable with the fact that this potentially could be some individual's screw up and that for all intents and purposes we're pirating it

A store has a sign that says "free bread", you take a loaf, and later it turns out that the sign was put out by mistake- are you a thief?

His point was that the allegorical "free CS2" sign is conspicuously missing in this case. I couldn't find one either...

I don't see a sign that says "free bread" that is my issue.

Whether you're a thief or not, is it harmful merely to wonder if you might be? I believe not.

No, but it also wouldn't kill you to check with the store owner first

If you don't return the loaf, I think you're being unethical.

I'm with you and I'm sick of Moral Decay.

Just because something is legal doesn't mean you should do it.

Just because you can do something questionable without anyone probably finding out, doesn't mean you should do it.

It doesn't help that Adobe has a million twitter accounts.

CS2 is not a Universal App on Macs, so this takes a PowerPC Mac, or Mac OS old enough to run Rosetta (Snow Leopard).

Thanks for the warning, the Windows versions it is then..

But hey, can't complain since it's free ;)

If you have vmware Fusion, you can install Snow Leopard within your Lion or Mountain Lion.

If I had to go that far, I'd be more inclined to install Windows- for all those other edge cases when you just have to have a Windows instance.

Agreed. Though I was just pointing out the existence of the Mac way, which could be much more inefficient performance-wise due to the double hit of Rosetta and VMware Fusion.

Seems to be down now:

Site Area Temporarily Unavailable

We're sorry, the site area you've requested is unavailable. Please try again later

Or maybe it's US only?

Sounds like a 'Price Error' event. Thought Adobe was lightened up and started playing smart.

I'm in Europe and I've got the same message. Guess I'm too late.

it was working fine earlier (3 hours ago) in the UK, managed to download and get a key.

I got the temporary unavailable message a few minutes ago and then got a download page on reload.

Down for me in the US as well

Just refresh it a few times.

Down in the UK.

Working fine here and I'm in the UK on Three mobile broadband, tapped refresh a few times all good, though waited few minutes and on the 5th refresh load check I got the sorry try later page.

Reminds me of my old telco day as between 3-5pm (GMT) USA lines were at there busiest as that is when they wake up and with that I suspect the same is true today in many ways still.

But is certainly not a case of any region limitations from what I can see and is just a busy site waking up to the morning local rush of freeness. The old /. effect.

I could access this on my mobile about an hour ago, but now it's just showing this error:

-----

Site Area Temporarily Unavailable

We're sorry, the site area you've requested is unavailable. Please try again later.

-----

It's so frustrating to miss out on stuff like this.

Could it just be that they possibly have a limit on the number of connections "leeching" their goods?

I found this article online which gives more details on this offering : http://www.ghacks.net/2013/01/07/grab-adobe-creative-suite-2...

Unfortunately that article doesn't have any more or less information than we ourselves have. It is just an "article" written about the page the OP linked to.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/adriankingsleyhughes/2013/01/07/...

"No, You Can't Download Adobe CS2 Applications For Free"

It appears they now have a hard redirect set up, so I would say this was a mistake.

Wouldn't Adobe stand to lose a lot of money, since people can use the upgrade path instead of a full purchase?

I imagine that would be a stopping block to making earlier versions free or very cheap.

They only offer upgrade pricing from CS5. They stopped offering upgrades prices to CS3 and CS4 owners at the end of 2012:

http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/faq/upgrade-poli...

On the other hand, the links have this string in them: <snip>/CS2_EOL/<snip>

So maybe they decided to give it away, because it's EOL'd sooo hard. Let's see how this develops :)

This is great for all the people at work who insist they need photoshop to crop and resize a few pictures.

Well I don't think CS2 became obsolete. I mean 7 years gone but that doesn't mean that the features are now basic...

I still use CS2 for all my web design work. I installed the demo of CS6 and looked at what had been improved in my normal workflow and it turned out it hadn't really changed since CS2.

While the world thinks its obsolete, it really isn't.

Frustrating however as I now can't reinstall After Effects CS2 as they haven't resolved the termination of the activation servers for that.

Is the site down for everybody now?

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