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> 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
by dahart 3y ago
> 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?
I can think of lots of reasons. From a competitive point of view, you might risk having a big enough resurgence that it eats into the business of your replacement. From a technical point of view, it may reveal parts of the sausage making, or expose technology and libraries that you still use and rely on. From a legal point of view, it could open up multiple kinds of liability. From a support and staffing perspective, it typically takes at least a little time to open source something, if you want to do it well, there’s usually vetting & review by engineers and lawyers, and usually the need for more/better documentation than the internal docs.
Think about this from a business perspective- if they predict there’s going to be no financial upside, even indirectly, and there are costs and risks associated with it, then why would they? When companies open-source something, it’s not usually because the code is dead, it’s usually because the people in it are committed to open source and the org agrees to support that cause, or because the company stands to gain valuable attention from the community, and eventually or indirectly, profits.
We do have to support and celebrate when companies decide to release code, but we can’t really expect it or complain when they don’t, it just doesn’t make sense to them and they’re not obligated.
- iforgotpassword 3y agoI'd guess something big as Windows 9x contains A LOT of licensed third party code which would be a nightmare to get permission for. Try finding five dozen rights holders after thirty years...
- pizzapill 3y agoThis is the usual argument you hear when it comes to old Games. It often would take way to long time to "clean" them up from 3rd party contributions/licenses etc. For a OS this is a impossible task.
- mcpackieh 3y agoUsually the argument goes that it would take time/money to rewrite the parts they don't have rights to, but simply deleting those parts and releasing the (now broken) code would be much better than nothing. Of course this assumes they kept track of who owns what code in the first place. Probably a bad assumption in the case of games particularly.
- mrandish 3y ago> Of course this assumes they kept track of who owns what code in the first place. Not only that but for any large company to release code somebody in engineering needs to look at it to at least know what all is there, the legal department needs to assess the risk of potential liability, then which license to release it under needs to be decided. Finally, somebody in a senior business role needs to sign off on doing it. I think it's great when old code gets released but the reason it's rare is it gets complex and it's nobody's job to do it. That's why many such releases are thanks to an employee deciding to care about doing it and having the internal cred and sway to push it through. Or, as it appears in this case, someone who had access to the code and is awesome enough to release it anonymously years later when the business is defunct or will no longer care.
- account42 3y agoThis would all be a lot easier if copyright itself had more reasonable term lengths.
- tobr 3y agoAs far as I understand, this is even true of lesser known old movies - even the work of figuring out who has the rights to what is unlikely to pay back, so it’s just never released in a digital format.
- deaddodo 3y agoThis is almost exclusively usually due to either producer credits or music licensing. For the former, if it's really that big they'll just release it and keep a standard budget aside for if/when the unlocated people come out. The latter is what really blocks movies because it actively costs them money, so they need to be able to earn more than what it is costing them to release. This makes music-heavy/niche music films much more expensive for potential broadcasters/streamers.
- wengo314 3y agodon't quote me on that but i read somewhere that microsoft has a strict policy of NIH in their codebase - everything gets reimplemented from scratch unless it's completely unfeasible. The only problem might be the software patents that their code leverages.
- kanzenryu2 3y agoFrom memory they got their TCP/IP stack via the MIT licence
- p_l 3y agoBSD license, because Berkeley was literally paid to port TCP/IP to Unix (and C) on basis that the resulting code would be available for incorporation by others free of charge.
- happymellon 3y agoWhy would parents prevent publishing of source code? Unless you mean that someone could see that you implemented their patent and retroactively go to sue them?
- favorited 3y agoA license to use someone else's code doesn't necessarily include permission to publish the source.
- happymellon 3y agoA patent isn't permission to use their code, that would be a copyright. A patent is a method, not an implementation.
- favorited 3y agoWe’re not talking about patents. Software licenses are about me allowing you to use code that I wrote, which is copyright.
- thfuran 3y agoWe should just shorten copyright to get around that problem.