Something always bugs me when a project dies on the internet. There's never a body.
Perhaps i grew up watching one too many nature documentaries, but i always feel that if Company Y tried something, and it doesn't "work" that they should release the code (or at least as much as they can). Why should Company Y do this instead of sit on the code and hope that one day they might do a better job? Any number of reasons:
1) Once a project is dead, it's dead. No, Company Y isn't going to magically revive things in 3 years when the market is better, and if they do, they're not going to have the same folks, technologies, machines involved. They're going to redo it because when they tried this combination, it didn't work (duh).
2) Even the biggest flops still have fans. Sure your project may have "only" gotten 30,000 users, but that's still a helluva lot of folks to flip off. You may not want to make Edsels anymore, but it doesn't mean that there aren't collectors and fanciers of the beast who are willing to run the things without your help.
3) The Infinite Monkeys may actually fix your problems They might make something better than what you came up with and you'll be able to re-integrate with it pretty darn fast.
4) Remember when Company G had that cool project that failed that you would have loved to use bits of? It's the same reason that OpenSource is so damn appealing. You're getting something insanely cheap that you can use for your own. Sure, it may only get you 80% there, but that's 80% you didn't pay for. As for Company G? They're already writing off the loss.
Yes, there may be portions that rely on PROPRIETARY SYSTEM Y™ that will have to be ripped out. i'll note that there's a market for decommissioned fighter jets that have plenty of dangling bare wire too. Your code would be like that. Hell, chances are damn good that said PROPRIETARY SYSTEM Y® is probably some dottering old chunk of tech you'd be happy replacing with OpenVersionX which was just released a year ago and runs circles around your stuff. Use those Infinite Monkeys to help show you how to integrate to it.
There's also one other added bonus in all that: If you were building something that you thought might wind up on the Daily WTF if it ever failed, how much more carefully would you craft things?
