In the corporate failures I've witnessed first hand, someone owned the source code, be it investors or whoever won the bid in a Chapter 7 liquidation auction.

In the corporate failures I've witnessed first hand, someone owned the source code, be it investors or whoever won the bid in a Chapter 7 liquidation auction. In the former case, they generally had an unrealistic hope they could still made something of it, in the latter, it's cleared long after the company is out of business, and in either case it would take work from someone who's been let go, or a "software archaeologist", to even put it up on GitHub, let alone decide what can be legally released.