I have been in two different situations many years ago, neither of which I take responsibility for, ha-ha:
1. Contractor relationship gone sour, turned out they had withheld source code from us. This lead to a dispute regarding the code ownership. Meanwhile we were running the corresponding binaries in the wild. We ended up reverse engineering the missing parts.
2. Source code is centrally managed on a server, hard disk failure, restore not working or backups wholly missing, don't remember. This was the pre-git era, probably Visual SourceSafe, which was entirely centralized.
For me personally, let's just say I feasted my eyes and learned a lot. But I wager that there is still a lot of companies vulnerable in very similar ways today.
1. Contractor relationship gone sour, turned out they had withheld source code from us. This lead to a dispute regarding the code ownership. Meanwhile we were running the corresponding binaries in the wild. We ended up reverse engineering the missing parts.
2. Source code is centrally managed on a server, hard disk failure, restore not working or backups wholly missing, don't remember. This was the pre-git era, probably Visual SourceSafe, which was entirely centralized.
For me personally, let's just say I feasted my eyes and learned a lot. But I wager that there is still a lot of companies vulnerable in very similar ways today.