Are you sure that the replacement serial numbers are individualized? When I tried googling, some of my replacement serial numbers are found on the web, some aren't. This seems to suggest that they are not individualized -- at least for some product & platform combinations.

My own theory about the motivation of the original giveaway is that they lost the ability to generate new licenses for those old versions, so they made it free. A comment[1] from 3 years ago:

How could they lose the ability to create licenses? I can think of many scenarios: The one server that ran the legacy license code crashed, and they had no backups. Or they lost the database of who had which product and serial number, so there was no way to verify anything when someone needed to reactivite an old product or move their license to a different system. Or there was a new bug or incompatibility in their license generator, perhaps due to a server upgrade, but the source code for the licensing software was lost so there was no way to rebuild it.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15732354

Just an assumption because I have two legit OS X CS3 Master Collection serials, got two different replacement offline serials for them, and those serials don't work for the Windows version just like the originals didn't v(._. )v

Completely seriously, isn't Adobe missing out on a significant community of graying designers who would be entirely contented to pay Adobe quintennially for a long term support version with standard menus and hardened fuzzed etc security wash before rtm?

Priced at say 60 percent of the current subscription, and given the opportunity for satisfying this constituency of customers who I am not sure at all would be Adobe customers in the future otherwise, isn't even such a radical branch viable?

I guess maybe this is based on projections about whether (in Adobe’s case) those customers unwilling to pay a subscription are likely to ever buy upgrades, maybe also it’s easier to focus on pleasing a smaller number of more “committed” customers? Not sure really, I’d be interested to read more.

But it’s probably a conscious decision on their part, unfortunately, so I doubt we’ll ever see “one off” purchase software from Adobe again.

I do pay for their Photography package (Lightroom, Photoshop and cloud storage) and actually the cloud storage and iOS versions of Lightroom make it worthwhile for me. I occasionally need a vector editor and would probably pay another £5-10/month for Illustrator, but instead I’d have to jump to paying for full CC, so I use Affinity Designer instead!

The Affinity applications get a lot of things right, and do some things better than Adobe already. And obviously the pricing and permanent sale model are much more attractive than Adobe's subscription model.

They do also have some almost unbelievable limitations, where what you'd expect to be entry-level functionality simply doesn't exist, and they lack any sort of plug-in ecosystem and all the extensibility and customisation that brings.

But saying that, it's not as if Adobe's applications haven't had bizarre omissions over the years, and they've had much longer to fix them. Hopefully Serif can keep up the momentum and community good will it's built for the Affinity suite and in time they'll close the gaps.

Are there any specific examples that come to mind? I recently heard about Afinity and am planning to give it a try next time I need a Photoshop or Illustrator replacement.

But then again, for a very long time very basic search and replace options were missing in InDesign, so as I said before, it's not as if Adobe's software hasn't had its share of bizarre limitations over the years as well.

[0] https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6002319/Dolbyvsad...

This is the only reasonable way it should be done with old software.

> This resulted in a bunch of press about it being a omg completely free Creative Suite

Just write it in bold - something like "it's not free, you are only eligible if you have purchased a license". Whoever wants to pirate will pirate anyway

> they gave everything a shiny new Flash-based UI in CS

Flash?? Seriously?

Hell, a lot of high-budget video games around the same time used a little thing called Autodesk Scaleform. That's basically Autodesk's reimplementation of Flash Player (Adobe was too short-sighted to pursue this market) which game developers could quite easily license and embed into their games.

I'll be damned if I can find a reference, but it's definitely a “non-native” UI, probably using Adobe AIR.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_AIR

https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/