I bought an unbranded drawing tablet a long time ago from a small Chinese company on Alibaba. The driver CD came with source code for the (Windows 3.11 and 9x)

I bought an unbranded drawing tablet a long time ago from a small Chinese company on Alibaba. The driver CD came with source code for the (Windows 3.11 and 9x) driver and configuration utility as well as a PDF describing the interface protocol (which used the serial port). I was pleasantly surprised but then realised that they likely did that because they only cared about selling the hardware and hadn't thought about wanting other user-hostile revenue streams (yet). I would be fine without open sourcing drivers, but just releasing documentation (and perhaps fragments of demo code) but I suspect a lot of companies are reluctant to do either because they believe there is some secret sauce in the software. Otherwise they'd be more interested in outsourcing to the "community" to do the work for them for free.