I think it's a myth that you can flip a switch and open source your code. Technically, you can, but in many cases it would be no better than closed anyway. Prop

I think it's a myth that you can flip a switch and open source your code. Technically, you can, but in many cases it would be no better than closed anyway. Proprietary code often has a lot of dependencies and it can be hard to understand without being devoted full-time. Just building it often requires a fairly complex procedure with its own dependencies (often on specific versions of libraries and compilers). So throwing the code up on github isn't really "open sourcing" it. The question then becomes: is it a net social benefit to spend the large effort to truly open source a particular code base? And the answer is that it depends.