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There should a legislation. If company stops support or goes bust it should open source the software.


Open sourcing proprietary software isn't necessarily easy. I was at Netscape when we sanitized the codebase to release as Mozilla, and there was plenty of third-party code that had to be left out. (That's part of why Mozilla was so slow to get off the ground. That, and the fact that compiling Navigator was always a pain in the donkey, even when you had the whole thing.)


That doesn't really seem practical. What if it uses proprietary technology that the company still wants to retain?




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