Whether they intend to help or to give the software away for free matters little as long as they don't restrict their downloads in any way. On the aforementioned blog post Adobe sais 'While this might be interpreted as Adobe giving away software for free, we did it to help our customers', so while Adobe does not confirm that this software is being given away for free to everyone they also don't deny it. There were reports on this on January 7th but the reported pages were quickly offline again and there was a dementi from Adobe but then a day later the download pages were back and we'll list the links to the public download pages we found on this public Adobe Help page below. On January 8th 2013 Adobe decided to put all of this onto public web pages which makes Photoshop CS2 freely available to everyone who cares to get it. At first they seem to have released their static serial number solution to the problem on an internal page requiring existing customers to log-in using their Adobe IDs. That probably posed a legal problem for Adobe, we did buy unrestricted licenses without any 'end of life' as they call it. Neither internet nor phone activation work anymore.

They might have done that because the activation services could not be recovered and all of us who bought CS2 back in its day can since no longer activate the software using our actual serial numbers. After Adobe had put the activation servers for all of their CS2 products out of service as of December 13th 2012 due to a technichal glitch (as they claim on their blog) they made the whole CS2 product line including Photoshop CS2 available to their customers using a static serial number per product.

On January 8th 2013 something very interesting happened. The following information might be very useful for existing and future users of ColorPerfect but please understand that Adobe does not offer product support for these downloads and that what you do with this information is your own responsibility. Get a free host for ColorPerfect - Photoshop CS2 is available for download from Adobe at no charge

Is photoshop cs2 free