That may or may not be true - they have open-sourced several large projects. Flex (http://www.adobe.com/products/flex.html), for example is a big software product that Adobe switched to open source in 2007.
From an article back then:
"Ward outlined the transition as having the following steps:
Today - Creation of Mailing List for Discussion
Summer 2007 - Public Bug Database and Daily Builds
Second Half 2007 - Flex 3 Released
December 2007 - Read Only SVN Access, Patches Welcome
2008 - Committers with Write Access, Creation of Possible Subprojects "
Flash is also a runtime for code and supports video decoding. Fireworks on the other hand is a utility application built around the PNG graphics format (which is not patented, but Adobe/Macromedia has extended it for Fireworks metadata).
But even if it is a more suitable candidate to open-source, I just don't think there's much in it for Adobe. It'll just cost a lot of money with the lawyers involved and the whole code-base will need to be reviewed.
yup, Adobe has been in the business of buying up competition for years. They aren't just going to give away a system that will take share away from their products.
From an article back then:
"Ward outlined the transition as having the following steps:
see: http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/04/flex-open-sourceand: http://readwrite.com/2007/04/26/adobe_takes_fle