You could do all that and the code would still not have any intrinsic worth, because if a company gets their hands on it they don't automatically get a team of developers with domain expertise to maintain it going forward. That's where the real value is. Knowledge and experience can never be codified.
So your saying it would take someone the same amount of time to say recreate an OS like windows, without the source code as it would to become proficient in building and maintaining it?
I don't buy that, if I wanted to create a $HIGHDOLLAR application, and It was possible to get away with stealing the source code i'm sure it would happen more frequently.
Its not that the code for windows/etc is worthless, its that anyone attempting to make any money selling a clone that was obviously based on it would be put out of business.
If OTOH, they sold a license to resell products based on the XP64 code base you can bet there would be LTS/embedded/etc type companies pooping up selling their own versions.
So while the effort to get a functioning build system and learn the code base is considerable, its a lot easier than reinventing the wheel. Hence why the code _DOES_ have value.
