This particular source code is from an extremely old version of Photoshop, there would be no potential commercial harm whatsoever from allowing people to reuse this source code however they want.
I could have lived with the "no commercial use" restriction that's typically used, but to not have a right to redistribute at all severely restricts its utility.
Given that the commercial value of this particular source code drop is effectively zero, I fail to see what Adobe being a billion dollar company has to do with anything. Nor do I see what this has to do with the "OSS" movement of "Free Software" in general, neither of which were mentioned in my original post.
Copyrights that may expire long after my death also don't seem like something I should be grateful for.
It's not that easy I guess. Even Photoshop 1 has tons of patents in it's algorithms.
As long the web site stays up, everyone is free to go there and download it for himself/herself.
Nor any ports to attempt ot make it compileable/runnable.
Code isn't supposed to be hung on a wall. If you can't even collaborate to make it work again, it does lose a lot, and waiting ~95 years isn't really a practical alternative.
Will the website stay up that long? Is archive.org allowed to preserve it?
[1] http://fabiensanglard.net/quakeSource/index.php
On the other side, the road is paved with failed OSS companies that were praised as "really getting it", starting with the archetypal one: VA Linux.
(btw, is my typo that amusing to you? Wait till you find out about cat videos then...)
As usual, Adobe doesn't "get it".