I guess my point is that for 90%+ of software companies, you can very easily reverse engineer the software or just rewrite it from scratch. If I were given $50

I guess my point is that for 90%+ of software companies, you can very easily reverse engineer the software or just rewrite it from scratch. If I were given $50 million to build a Slack competitor, even if I had Slack's source code I can't imagine it would be that helpful. More than likely it would be easier to rewrite and re-architect in order to not inherit all of the technical debt of very old software. Not to mention in most cases, access to the source code doesn't mean you can easily recreate the AWS / Google Cloud / Azure environments necessary to run the source code reliably with scalability. Edit: There are obvious exceptions to this, but most apps these days don't require a whole lot of proprietary algorithms that can't be easily cloned without source code access.