Photoshop Is Free! Wait… No It’s Not?

Yesterday, for approximately two hours, the complete CS2 Suite of Adobe products, which includes Photoshop, was free. Granted, this is a ten year old program, but it's still a really good program. The Internet went crazy with the news. Sites like Forbes and Gizmodo were reporting on how to download the free copies of Adobe Creative Suite 2.

But was that the whole story?

The demand was so high that Adobe's site was crushed under the overwhelming traffic, but there were still many of us who managed to download the programs. And then we found out that it was all a "mistake" and it wasn't a free download. Oops?

From Adobe:

Adobe is absolutely not providing free copies of CS2! 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. (Special serial numbers are provided on the page for each product download.) You are only legally entitled to download and install with that serial number if you have a valid license to the product!

So if this is the case, why did Adobe post all the install files with the serial numbers for the entire world to see? Why didn't they lock out the offending serial numbers? This whole thing doesn't make a lot of sense if you ask me.

So for those of us who actually managed to download CS2 and activate it with the provided serial keys, what do we do? Should we uninstall and delete the program or keep it and call it good fortune?

By the way, you can still download the entire CS2 suite direct from Adobe.