Do industry veterans open source their work to be remembered?

A vast amount of Quake source code was famously released under GPL (though without much of the maps/content). Nevertheless, the contents of the engine and sheer genius that went into making it cemented John Carmack as one of the most prolific developers of his time. Quake 2 was already a vastly impressive title for the time, digging into the technical details gave it a whole new angle of appreciation for computer scientists.

YMMV, though. The Quake release worked for a few reasons:

- They used a GPL license to prevent other companies from poaching their work outright

- The source code they were releasing was arguably quite sought-after, in both gaming and programming communities

So for that particular scenario, everything went alright. Even as a free software advocate I'll admit that there are places you could run into trouble, but historically, open-sourcing your work can really help lend credibility to impressive technology.