This is an interesting analogy. I definitely can see this in effect already for software for work/personal projects, but also a different version of it in the the hardware synth world, where there's been an avalanche of custom firmwares for various synth. Some of them are based on official firmware source (rare so far, but increasingly common), but most are based on reverse engineering. See for example https://thefirmwarehub.com/ which catalogs custom firmware for the m-vave fm1, a particularly popular target.