Development is frozen because all the employees are now working at others companies. It will never be open source, as all the rights to the player software were sold when the company was sold, therefore, all rights are now with an external company.

Again, the software is now the property of an external company, the developers that no longer work there have no right to use the original source, regardless of how talented they are. There is still development ongoing on software that USES the original player software, but does not need to modify the core functionality.