Photoshop CS2 is now free

[Midgardsormr]

This blog post contains a currently not-working link that is reputed to be Adobe offering Photoshop CS2 for free:

Have an Older Computer? Download Adobe CS2 Premium Plus for Free | Fstoppers

I suspect the Adobe site is being slashdotted right now, so I wasn't able to verify the offer.

For reference, CS2 has most of the features used in tutorials on this site. There are some interface differences, no smart filters, less support for 32-bit images, and I think no 64-bit version.

[cadric]

That is a pretty damn amazing offer. CS2 might not be new, but its still very very good.

[Amonite]

It seems to have been some sort of mix up: No, You Can't Download Adobe CS2 Applications For Free - Forbes

[Midgardsormr]

Interesting. So essentially they've cracked their own software and exposed it to the public on the assumption that only people who are entitled to it will install it.

I read through the comments and the forum thread, and came up with one further quotation from Adobe:

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. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

Okay, the winking and nudging wasn't really part of the quote.

[Diamond]

I've used CS2 for the last several years and have had no problems with it (except that my PC doesn't have enough hard drive or memory to run extremely large map files). ...Although I will be upgrading to a significantly larger and better system later this month along with updating to CS6...

CS2 may be old, but it works great. From what I've read, a lot of the later versions tried to fix stuff that wasn't broken and only succeeded in screwing it all up. CS6 seems to be a cut above, though the only reason I'm even updating is that the friend of a friend works for Adobe and is getting it for me at a drastically cut price.

[Larb]

I only have CS3 thought I use CS5 at work. They pretty much mostly work the same for me except for some more specialist functions. It would be great if CS2 was free - it is very capable. The other option would be offering CS2 for a nominal fee ($5 or $10 maybe?) - it's an old program and as the activation servers are now down, it might get people to pay a little money for something they would otherwise have pirated.