> Is there any good reason why the sources need to stay closed if they aren't going to make any further gains, financial or otherwise, from this product and its ecosystem?
Many reasons are there , it takes a lot of effort for a company to open source anything, to name a few
- Not get sued for IP infringement if your developer from 20 years back copied something or used GPL code etc
- Potentially expose active trade secrets , the program might not be sold , parts the code /algorithms whole modules might still be used in newer applications.
- Presence of PII or other sensitive/inflammatory content in comments and code, could be anything from funny(but inappropriate )method names to comments and documentation .
- poor boundaries, you could have dependencies which are used by the app which are not possible to also be open sourced.
- poor documentation, you simply no longer have all the code or is it time consuming to piece it all together
- expose vulnerabilities in your current offerings , code sometimes has way of being reused , you would be surprised how much “dead” code has a way of living on for decades later .
- third party agreements, not all your code is “your” code, you may have only licensed it from another vendor.