The only official statement from the company about it appears to be this :
Effective December 13, Adobe disabled the activation server for CS2 products and Acrobat 7 because of a technical glitch. These products were released over 7 years ago and do not run on many modern operating systems. But to ensure that any customers activating those old versions can continue to use their software, we issued a serial number directly to those customers. While this might be interpreted as Adobe giving away software for free, we did it to help our customers.
http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2013/01/update-on-cs2-and-acrobat-7-activation-servers.htmlWhich is incredibly vague.
