Yeah, I feel like someone needs to write a guide to corporations 'successfully open sourcing a project'. Together with some of Oracle's decisions we have recently had a number of bad examples.
On one hand side - yes, the "open sourcing" of some projects was done in a really silly way.
On the other - I'm glad they at least do this when abandoning the project. How many times do we hear "if they discontinue this, they might at least open the source so we can continue porting"? As long as we agree it's pretty much EOLing rather than open-sourcing, we can be glad that we don't get left with binary blobs noone can reuse in any way.
I personally do not believe in Open Sourcing as EOLing is going to help anyone. The donating codebase is often a large piece of code where the original developers have been pulled onto something else and therefore the documentation is too limited for generally anyone else to even compile. And the development community just ends up with one more project that PHBs can point to as 'why open source does not work'.
