I always wondered what would happen if some developers used some GPL lib and shipped to customers and it was noticed and caused the company to be sued. Would all the developers be fired on the spot and the software undone?
In a lot of commercial code there is almost literally nothing worth protecting, just sunk-cost. If a finite element package got open sourced, that would be a minor disaster (although even then you're paying for the UX and support not the code) but things like firmware are barely worth the electrons on the drive.
The point being the business impact would probably be fairly minor for most projects.
(It is at this point that I realize that maybe one of the reason that HFT people like arcane formal-proof languages so much—besides just verifying that they won't lose money—is that the ecosystems of unusual languages are smaller, so it's less likely that any problem has a solution involving third-party code, and therefore there's less concern about IP contamination.)
For any sizable software that has been alive for 10 years. There is no way it's safe to open source the repo.
They don't have to release code and the licensed software's owners don't have their rights violated any further
Of course, IANAL