If You’re Going To Kill It, Open Source It

For example, a company that closed while owing money could not just "distribute" their remaining assets by releasing them into the open-source domain. Investors, employees, shareholders even founders may have legitimate claims to maximizing the value of that asset.

Equally, if there are multiple parts to the asset, they may not necessarily be disposed of "together". As a simplistic example a robotics company may sell off the hardware separate to software. And the software itself might be separated into different lots.

So the _creators_ of the product are not necessarily the _disposers_ of the product. And the person buying the thing (for whatever reason) is unlikely to spend money and then just give it away.

For companies that remain existing after the discontinuation of the product, the problems are even more complex. Take for example Sony's robotic technology. Just because they've discontinued the consumer products does not mean their investment in the tech is wasted. I think it's safe to assume that at some point in the future Sony would be able to either sell, or leverage that investment.

At the end of the day it's about balancing the upside and the downside. The upside to Sony, HP etc is negligible (some hacker types are happy) whereas the potential downside (loss of IP rights, effort to release, on-going impact, legal liability, trademark issues etc) are substantial. Even the effort to determine the downside is significant.

Now of course, if you've got some unheard of webapp, that attracted 5 users before you killed it, it's trivial to open-source that. On the other hand that _is_ probably happening all the time, and nobody cares.

On its surface it appears as if the company can at least get some good will out of its loss. Assuming Open-Sourcing it will not affect their ability to write-off the loss, you would assume it would be a simple no-brainer.

1. Because releasing your code might expose you to lawsuits if you have used other companies IP.

2. Because you might have your own patents and IP in that product that you don't want to release.

3. Because 1 & 2 means you have to pay the money to have a lot of legal analysis.

4. Open sourcing n$ worth of work can make is more difficult to pick it up later if the situation changes.

I can see how this is harder for big and complicated companies but I think this can be overcome through planning and cultural change. I think the net effect for both builders and consumers (and society in general) would be positive.

Perhaps it could be made part of patent/copyright law itself, therefore providing a level playing field and reducing the fear of losing competitive advantage.