There was a lot of support internally to open source Flash, but the reality is that Adobe used a lot of partner solutions that have patents to improve Flash for

There was a lot of support internally to open source Flash, but the reality is that Adobe used a lot of partner solutions that have patents to improve Flash for various needs-- video DRM is one example, but there's other more practical features that used patents too. The work to remove all the patents would have taken at least 6m to a year, and that's far too much investment for no ROI.