Adobe Briefly Gives Away Free Creative Suite 2
For a short period on Monday, Adobe Creative Suite 2 (CS2) was made available for free download without any activation requirement. As this Ars Technica post points out, it was a nearly brilliant move that turned out to have been done by mistake.
When Adobe shut down the activation servers for Creative Suite 2, there was no longer any way for users of the software to permanently reinstall it. Strangely, rather than offer a patch to make activation unnecessary, a full copy of the software package was made available for download along with a working serial number. Beyond that, all that was required was a free-to-create Adobe ID. The news of this spread quickly through Twitter and CS2 was downloaded an untold number of times.
Instead of rolling with it, as the linked article argues they ought to have, Adobe put out a clarification and removed the download page, thus putting an end to free CS2 downloads.