Why can't we regulate industries to open their code?

Question

what are some of the difficulties that companies face from being forced to give a licensed copy of the code to the end user? It doesn't have to be open source but just viewable or modifiable by the end user. How will that harm the proprietary software? Business still can't use it for free as it is not open source. Legal liabilities? I think those are important and for the good.Of course it can't apply to everything so maybe any code running on a piece of hardware you purchase also gives you an individual license to modify, view or update the code?

hos234 · Accepted Answer

Depends on size of the project. They do it often actually. Sometimes after they have decided to move internal maintainers/teams elsewhere, or don't have budgets to support the project anymore, or the company strategy has changed etc
That's when they suddenly develop a great affection for the "community" and "giving back" :)
In large orgs it can be a costly process for large codebases. Requires a bunch of planning. Large codebases (sometimes with code from acquisitions/different source control systems/clients/sold off divisions etc) are full of all kinds of stuff (stolen code, proprietary code licensed from others, non attributed open source stuff, server passwords, user data etc etc) that no one knows anything about. All that needs to be checked sometimes by a large number of tech people and then legal teams to make sure no one gets sued.