Adobe almost does something amazing by accident
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
This is not to say that CS2 is necessarily superior to the GIMP; it may or may not be. It doesn't really matter;
I love open source. I really do, but GIMP is one of the most horrid applications I've used. Not just graphics applications. All applications.
GIMP is anti-user. You to get frustrated doing simple things, and expect to spend more time on Google than GIMP. And not in the good blender way where you learn a new shortcut and you become more productive. The "oh I'd never expect to see that option there" way. Even something simple as basic window management is a pain in the ass.
MyPaint, .NetPaint, and Inkscape make GIMP look like a joke. I hope the unusable mess that is GIMP either dies or gets it shit together.
May be trivial for those who don't work on front end development, but a huge selling point for Adobe.
Photoshop was worth the money.
Do you mean Paint.NET or are you referring to another program?
Paint.net and the like are amateur tools, they're not even playing in the same category. Pixelmator has a nice UI but is still underfeatured and so is Acorn. Inkscape is a vector tool.
Also, Inkscape, which I also use very regularly in my work, is not the best example to use when badmouthing GIMP. It crashes more, runs slower, and has an even less standardized and more unpredictable UI.
UPDATE: You still need a paid license to use it legally. This is a service Adobe is providing to make life easier for existing licensed users of CS2 to enable continued usage. "While this might be interpreted as Adobe giving away software for free, we did it to help our customers" ( http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2013/01/update-on-cs2-a...)
So why did they make the software downloadable at all and not just the special license keys? The Macromedia Studio MX 2004 suite they acquired uses the same activation servers. In that case they only made special license keys available and not the software.
This smells like a thinly veiled strategy to penetrate the market without saying so (for whatever reason).
If you have real work to do and you want to be "legit", you have one of the many superior free or low-cost alternatives available. And if you're making a living with creative suite at the core of your toolset, you have a copy of creative suite by hook or by crook.
For one, it's unsupported and doesn't run so great on modern hardware and operating systems.
A crippled version of the most current version of the software would make much more sense.
[1] : http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb10-30.ht...
Learning to work with a big software package makes it harder to switch to another editing suite. Free cs2 does make sense.
From the forums:
" Dov Isaacs wrote: 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."
On that same page users mentioned that this "looked like a legitimate product form the official web-site."
Earlier HN threads called this whole thing 'marketing', I'm not going to say this wasn't an accident. I'm saying that: a thing like this, where people get excited over nothing could have been avoided with just a little notice on the download page. That would've been enough to stop this as it was going on. Giving people access to software you don't want them to use is silly.