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A comment on You can no longer reinstall CS 2 or 3 even if you have the original disks. Parent comment

Re:You can no longer reinstall CS 2 or 3 even if you have th... by alister on Friday October 23, 2020 @12:01AM (#24865936)
That was an excellent summary of Adobe's software giveaway.

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

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Re:You can no longer reinstall CS 2 or 3 even if you have th... by Lammy on Friday October 23, 2020 @12:06AM (#24865957)
> But are you sure that the replacement serial numbers are individualized?

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

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Re:You can no longer reinstall CS 2 or 3 even if you have th... by laverya on Friday October 23, 2020 @12:18AM (#24865996)
Well, that could easily still be the case if there was one code for Windows and one for OS X.
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Re:You can no longer reinstall CS 2 or 3 even if you have th... by OJFord on Friday October 23, 2020 @04:21AM (#24867147)
At least two for OS X, since GP had two.
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Re:You can no longer reinstall CS 2 or 3 even if you have th... by asddubs on Friday October 23, 2020 @01:31AM (#24866286)
I believe for the CS2 versions they released the mac serials were also different from the windows versions, and each product had its own serial.
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