> Unfortunately that whole business unit got canned and the code is now gathering dust somewhere :/ would have loved to open source that oneI'd encourage you to reach out and ask for permission to release it. In the past I've found that the sticking point was usually copyright assignment rather than the release per-se (with a side helping of worry over hidden IP violations), so get them to release a tarball under a permissive license like MIT/BSD, even if your intention is to immediately fork it.
Basically, if you can manage to do the work for them so they can just rubber stamp the release, you can probably get it done.