I don't know of any companies which failed due to competitor access to source code. There are probably many companies that failed as businesses because their c

I don't know of any companies which failed due to competitor access to source code. There are probably many companies that failed as businesses because their code was open source and as a result they couldn't convince people to fund their work, so that seems like a more pressing concern. OpenSSL is a famous example of an open source project that is massively depended on, including by billion dollar companies, and yet the company/project trying to maintain it was receiving almost no funding until an outcry a few years ago. It might also be instructive to think about FreeBSD. It is much less popular than it used to be. Its code was used as part of the basis for the original Mac OS X release in 2001, but Apple's changes were made proprietary rather than contributed back to FreeBSD, and (arguably) as a result hardly anyone uses FreeBSD now, while millions use macOS. We can think of macOS as having been a competitor to FreeBSD in this sense. Linux, on the other hand, requires contributions to be given back to the main project, and is doing much better.