> Is there a risk those closed source projects would be sued following the release because they disclosed some forgotten sin?
I know nothing about law, but I guess software companies would protect themselves in advance by mandating that all their developers use only software and sources that belongs to them anyway. That would be useful in case of a lawsuit where a court could force them to show the sources to prove they don't come say from the claimant's reverse engineered software, or some other FOSS project. Things might be different with 3rd party modules and libraries, where an obscure module was licensed from a company that went out of business ages ago, but all their assets were acquired by another party who finds the module in the wild and decides to sue.
Just speculating, but although I'm 100% in favor of FOSS, if the above were real possibilities, I couldn't but understand why some companies are so reluctant to release even old code they couldn't profit from anymore.
When developing software, a company might aquire a license to add some library or code to their product.
This happens all the time with OS's like Windows (licensing the ability to play media formats, etc.) or games (licensing certain engines or algorithms).
That doesn't mean the company squired a license to release the libraries or code as open source 20 years later.
So you'd have to go through the codebase with a fine-toothed comb, line-by-line, because the original developers don't work for you anymore, and the license agreements are long lost.
Releasing large software projects are a massive cost to any company that wants to be protected from potential lawsuits.
I know nothing about law, but I guess software companies would protect themselves in advance by mandating that all their developers use only software and sources that belongs to them anyway. That would be useful in case of a lawsuit where a court could force them to show the sources to prove they don't come say from the claimant's reverse engineered software, or some other FOSS project. Things might be different with 3rd party modules and libraries, where an obscure module was licensed from a company that went out of business ages ago, but all their assets were acquired by another party who finds the module in the wild and decides to sue. Just speculating, but although I'm 100% in favor of FOSS, if the above were real possibilities, I couldn't but understand why some companies are so reluctant to release even old code they couldn't profit from anymore.