This isn't exactly what you mentioned, but Josh Pigford gave up on his startup Maybe, shut down the company and open sourced it. It got incredibly popular on Gi

This isn't exactly what you mentioned, but Josh Pigford gave up on his startup Maybe, shut down the company and open sourced it. It got incredibly popular on Github, so he started it up again. (https://maybefinance.com/ https://maybefinance.com/) A bigger example might be Mozilla. It was a closed-source browser (Netscape Navigator), and when it was dumped, some employees petitioned to open source it. And that's how we got Firefox.