Would that even be legal? The company has obligations to its creditors and shareholders; simply giving away potentially valuable intellectual property right before going under seems to violate those obligations. And it’s the sort of violation for which someone might be personally held liable.
I’m not claiming that a company can never open-source anything, but rather than they have to have a plausible business case for doing so. And I don’t see a plausible business (as opposed to humanitarian) case here… But I’m not a corporate lawyer, just someone interested in this sort of thing.
Edit: there’s also the FDA to consider. If you make medical devices and you want to release the source code, you probably need to demonstrate that it’s safe for users to reprogram their devices (and it’s not safe).
3 years later they’ll end the support
I don’t think that’s a fair characterization - it sounds like they ran out of money and the company that bought all their assets didn’t maintain support. In that company’s defense, it’s really hard to maintain support for something when you’ve bought the IP but you don’t have any of the institutional knowledge.
Once the boss can do this, he would just threaten to fire the unproductive employee. That generally works better than what you’re proposing because it doesn’t require turning employees into cyborg slaves. (The hard part is actually measuring productivity when the employee is doing something that isn’t easily quantified.)