It's not a stupid question, but often times open sourcing something involves one or more of the following: 1. Documenting everything so it's actually usable. A

It's not a stupid question, but often times open sourcing something involves one or more of the following: 1. Documenting everything so it's actually usable. At a minimum, "here is how to install the dumb thing" should probably be documented. 2. Often times there are hard-coded values that would need to be extracted out for security reasons or to simply allow someone to install it on a system not quite like yours. 3. Often times there are other dependences that would also have to be open sources such as modifications to libraries, internal libraries released, shell scrips, cron jobs, messaging queues, delayed job worker tasks, etc that the system may rely on. These all need to be packaged up, documented and/or released. In short it is a ton of work to take something that is running in our way on our hardware and generalize it enough that anyone else can run it. On the other hand, you wouldn't need their service to give you the protections they offered. Essentially, encrypted email storage. You can get that mostly off the shelf using any linux distro if you run your own mail service.