Releasing source code (especially under a permissive license) would be extremely hard, even more so with software that old. There could be small 3rd party modules buried in the code base whose original developer is impossible to find, or could have passed years ago and they have no ways to contact anyone who owns the rights, let alone have everyone of them agree on open sourcing and under which license. There would be a fairly big chance of liability, and I couldn't blame them for not wanting to test that. Software should be open from the beginning.
Code has more value than if it can be ran or not. Its 4 decades of problems and their solutions. For anyone who wants to do any work in the music notation space, it could be quite invaluable to go through the lessons learned, to see things from another perspective, especially one that went all the way to production and a long period of commercial viability.
That is theoretically possible, just seems very very unlikely. Finale is “millions” of lines of code, old legacy code that spanned dozens of OSes. Have you ever tried to read huge legacy codebases? They are hard to read, and I’m dramatically understating it. The time it would take to read and extract lessons learned from it could exceed the time available to do any work in the music notation space. Most of the lessons that are there to extract are lessons that no longer apply to anything. Not being able to build & run the code would reduce the ability to understand it by another multiple factor. It would be far more efficient to hunt down and interview the Finale devs, or spend time working on another product and learn from it.
All that is beside the point that Finale devs are under zero obligation to release their code, and generally speaking they have a decent list of reasons not to, plus some specific ones I speculate.
It’s a nice thought, just extremely unlikely, no? Unlikely that someone has the time to deal with a huge legacy system, and unlikely they’ll be able to rewrite portions and get it working. There are very good reasons this hardly ever happens, releasing proprietary code, even when it’s all modern and working. The potential downsides are usually bigger than the upsides.
It has happened with OpenJDK, first downstream with the IcedTea distribution, and then gradually things were replaced upstream or opened by Oracle. I think today, only the browser plugin is missing, and nobody really wants that anymore.
It's rare that this happens in the open like this. I expect that it was a factor that OpenJDK was a free software development tool, so Sun already had transferrable licenses from their suppliers. For other types of software, building new software with it is not a consideration from the outset, and licensing agreements with third-party component suppliers will reflect that.
