For example, a manual drill has no real draw backs it will always run. An electric drill with a cord, will likely always run and electrical components can be traced and sourced rather easily. A drill that was designed to use with a battery, will not always run, and has software/firmware with some other limitations likely buried in the software.
The moment support is dropped, it should be released to open source to allow others interested to maintain it. Such as with the Nvidia Geforce GTX 1080 Ti... no longer supported with driver updates (outside of "security updates"). The firmware should be supported by the people if the company doesn't want to support it, it still is an excellent card even 10 years later...
MMO or not, source code should just be released. Patents are not forever, source code shouldn't be either. Though patent might be too long as well. 15/20 years worked when things developed slowly, but now days its outdated within years and could benefit other advancements.
This should be the case, especially, for software that drives long-lived hardware devices in infrastructure roles (public works, manufacturing, etc).
> but documentation shouldn’t be an issue
Oh boy. I would bet that at any medium sized games company the number of people who can run the full stack of a game from client to backend locally is single digits, and that it is absolutely not documented.
If I recall (as an example) Final Fantasy 8 had to be redone based on the PC port rather than original source code because, well, nobody cared about that back then.
The situation has almost certainly improved since then. Still, we have to remember that cases like Doom and Quake where there was cleanish source code was an exception, not the norm.
Doubly so when there are 'licensed' libraries or middleware involved, stuff coming to mind being:
- DMX sound driver (Doom) - RAD tools (e.x. Warcraft/Diablo for cutscene video) - Renderware (GTA2/3 and Vice City, among others) - Console SDKs (in the case of console games)
And, again, sure. It's possible that if the source code is clean enough, you can safely rip those things out without needing legal review. But if the source isn't clean enough (and a lot of games, its not) there is a concern.
Doubly so when it comes to console only releases and not wanting to accidentally anger a manufacturer by unintentionally exposing an undiscovered exploit.