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David_Powers wrote:
The activation servers for CS2 were turned off more than two years ago. You need a special serial number to be able to install CS2 downloaded from there. Presumably, the other activation servers will eventually be turned off.
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How do you get one of those then (I assume you would have to own an original activation key for CS2). Pesumably Adobe will issue special serial numbers each time they turn off an activation server for each product someone owns otherwise they could find themseleves in deep legal trouble.
You can't offer a product 'outright' for sale and then switch it off with out making provisions for those that bought it and still want to run it - it would be a bit like me selling someone a car then taking it back a few years later.
https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-suite/kb/cs2-product-downloads.html
Technically speaking, no commercial software (not just Adobe's) is "sold outright". You buy a licence that allows you to use it under the terms of a legal agreement that's so long most people never read it. In the case of CS6 and earlier, the licence is perpetual, so you can run it for as long as it still works.
Although some people don't like the Creative Cloud subscription model, the number of subscribers is now nearly 4 million (http://www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/investor-relations/PDFs/ADBE-Q1-15-Datasheet.pdf?PID=2159997). I doubt very much that Adobe will go back to offering new versions on a perpetual licence. Like it or not, subscription is here to stay. Microsoft is doing the same with Office. If you don't need the new features in the latest versions, you can keep going with the old ones, but they'll never be updated, and there's no official support.
I'm sure Adobe will honour its commitment to perpetual licence holders for many years to come, but as the years go by, the older versions will become less and less useful. I think the main question is not so much when Adobe will pull the plug on activation servers, but when it will stop selling CS6. Once that happens, it could refuse to activate the program for anyone who had not already registered it by a cutoff date.