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There are three reasons why organizations and people don't open source their failed projects.

* Intellectual property issues * Pride * Pride

Don't underestimate the power of emotion, especially when it involves failure.

The last two go for communities, too. I've been a member of at least a couple great online communities where the owners lost interest but could not handle handing their baby to someone else - so they killed them instead.

They seemed utterly blind to the awesome communities that had formed, and unable to grasp how much harm shutting down caused to so many people.

There's another reason: support.

There are a lot of people who believe they're entitled to support for any code you release. Even if explicitly noted in a 72 point font that it's totally unsupported.

I'm sure its not too hard to just have everything from that email address forward to the trash if you're so inclined.

The difficulty isn't in ignoring support complaints yourself, it's in protecting your personal or corporate brand from the corrosive effects of all those complaints.

If someone googles your name and turns up a bunch of complaints in forums and blogs, that's a hard first impression to overcome no matter how you try to explain that you never promised those people anything.

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