I had a little company that went bust due to lack of funds.
When that happens, the assets of the business must be sold off to pay the creditors (we owed national insurance, PAYE tax, hosting services, salaries, etc).
In hopes of trying to raise cash to pay off those debts, the solicitor would *never* give something away when they could sell it.
I suppose I could have offered them a pittance for the software and then open sourced it, but as I hadn't drawn a salary in 2 years, that was difficult...and I'm not sure why I would have done it anyway, as it needed specialist knowledge to run the software.
I'm sure there could be elements of "I'm going home and taking my ball with me", but in our case it came down to cash.
That said, I doubt that's why Jobs didn't open source it. I would suspect that for him and his team it's always been about making the design of everything special...so special, you must be an alcolyte to play. (Apple can charge alcolytes, because they'll go to enough trouble). Average humans won't go to the trouble to create software for a closed system, so Apple guarantees it's 30%.
-Ken On 05/12/2011 17:17, Bob Sneidar wrote:
I think the reason is because he wanted to be able to reverse the decision, if at any point Apple wanted to resurrect the product in the future. Most software companies that go under do not open source their stuff, if for no other reason than to say to the public who didn't want to pay for it, "Okay then, NOBODY WINS!!!"
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