Actually, after thinking about it more, I think I flummoxed some of the details. But Google is not being my friend on this one, so I’m working mainly from memory.
Aldus and Altsys were still separate companies in 1995, but Aldus had a long-term, exclusive right to publish Freehand. Adobe’s acquisition would have acquired that license. There’s some details here.
Interestingly, in 1995 Adobe petitioned the FTC to relax the 10/94 consent order so that Adobe could acquire an interest in a company making illustration software without prior FTC approval. I’m not finding any record online regarding whether that petition was granted, but perhaps the antitrust strings are looser regarding Adobe acquiring Freehand this time around.
It’s interesting in the technical writing world too. Macromedia snatched up eHelp, producers of RoboHELP, the help authoring package. And then promptly killed it (in my thinking, because killing helps their rival package, WebWorks Publisher). Now that Adobe has Macromedia, what’s going to happen there?
Not that I’m optimistic. Adobe’s done exactly not much with FrameMaker, a program I use daily. And I’m really not sold on InDesign, the product they’re trying to position as Frame’s replacement - it simply doesn’t have the robust features that Frame has and that I need to produce long documents. It’s certainly great at layout. Long document management, not so much.