It is very difficult to move a non-trivial product from corporate developed with source code available to community developed even if both are technically open source.
If things like design docs & decisions, the main bug tracker, commit rights, and so on are all internal you end up with no one with the institutional knowledge to take over if the company decides to drop it. The most famous example of this is probably the open sourcing of Netscape Navigator which lead to a four year gap before the next release, due to a ground up rewrite.
If things like design docs & decisions, the main bug tracker, commit rights, and so on are all internal you end up with no one with the institutional knowledge to take over if the company decides to drop it. The most famous example of this is probably the open sourcing of Netscape Navigator which lead to a four year gap before the next release, due to a ground up rewrite.