[TimFogarty]

An interesting question about Stop Killing Games is if this should apply to software more broadly. If a company shuts down should they open source their product so people can continue using it? There isn't as strong an argument for this since most software is structured like a SaaS rather than a one time purchase. But it's considerate when companies do this, e.g. Facebook open sourcing Parse Server was better than outright discontinuing it.

[Ekaros]

Maybe not open source it. But at least allow it to operate in offline manner where for one time purchases you do not have any license checks that stop it from operating. I do not expect things like cloud sync to continue. But at least I should be able to run it on my local machine.

[petcat]

> If a company shuts down should they open source their product so people can continue using it?

The question is who is now responsible for the software? Who can the government compel to open source it? There is no more legal entity behind the software. Maybe the last employee just takes the source code home on their laptop and that's it.

How is a government forcing a private entity (especially a defunkt one) to release their source code?

[OkayPhysicist]

When a company shuts down, somebody becomes the new owner of their stuff, including their intellectual property. Most of the time it's whoever the company was in debt to. Now that company can choose to either host the software, or release it.

[OneMorePerson]

This just feels like one of those things that can be completely loopholed. There's plenty of reasons why a company might find a specific software not profitable but also not want to open source it, so under this rule they will just host it on the most basic server possible (only concurrently supports like 50 users) and never update it again. Effectively still dead.