So Adobe was never planning on suing anybody, but any third-party license agreements may have expired. Such as those with Pantone.
Why would this get anybody riled up about Adobe? (also the fact that the article is 4 years old...)
I mean is obvious to me, say you sell me some software, and next week you tell me, "hey sucker, I might have used some third party shit that I should not have, you should stop using the stuff or you might be in danger of lawsuits".
Something like this happened with some video games where they autoupdated and removed some contentment, this should be illegal, you do not change a deal a few years after , this products should not be sold but say clear "rent for 1,2,3 years" and then maybe people might decide that would be worth it to do something like Blender and finance an open project then getting screwed like this.
It's not important whether it was a net good to have Pantone integrated into Adobe products. What's important is that Adobe provided something under a certain set of terms, then changed those terms to the detriment of all their users not because of anything the users did, but because of their own failure to get a perpetual license from Pantone from the start.