D Finnigan wrote:
No, it's not irrelevant. One has to always consider the financial incentive: 1.) Are they still making a profit? 2.) Are we making a profit? If the answers to both questions is 'No', then the chances of legal action fall to almost zero. Sending out lawyers costs money. If a company is neither gaining nor losing money over a product, then they aren't going to pay for legal action.
That's not the entire issue. The body of code may contain (among things):- Third-party IP that Apple is licensing and which cannot be disclosed by the terms of that license.
- Trade-secrets.- Source code that could be twisted by a patent troll as evidence of infringement. This is certainly possible to reverse-engineer from object code, but it's a lot easier if you hand it to them in source form.
These are all reasons for a vendor to keep tight control of code bases even in the case where they do not produce revenue!
Steve