Because you'll never make it back. It will just be a money pit. You still need to keep it secure, host it, maintain it. And free users are much worse than paid users in terms of how entitled they feel so you can be prepared for a never ending stream of crap from people telling you how you should run it but who wouldn't pay $0.05 if the life of the site depended on it.

I certainly believe this but thread OP does not.

Because I'm not just made of money

I think it doesn't take too many more steps to answer your questions from here.

And if they were willing to sell it for a reasonable amount (three-digit sum of money), I might, but most likely they won't.

This corporate "has to be profitable" mentality needs to die. It's sad that we are in a place where even simple services require these supposedly ongoing maintenance costs, when they were originally designed as set-it-and-forget-it services

I'm not sure if I've understood your comment. Let me play devil's advocate for a while:

How can a "set-it-and-forget-it" web service exist from the service provider's POV? You always need to do small things like monitoring your servers and making sure they're all up-to-date and still working. This is ongoing maintenance cost. Additionally, you need electricity and some place to put your servers (be it virtual or physical).

Also, running something unprofitable out of your own pocket works as a hobby maybe, but not for a company at scale. You need to pay your employees. Even as a hobby it's problematic because you can only do it so many times until your regular income is exhausted.

A lot of this stuff is already open - in fact, you are allowed to run your own, local server. After shutdown, I'm pretty sure no one will stop you from hosting a free instance publicly. If in doubt, get written permission from the company, german laws apply.

Download: http://www.freedb.org/en/download__server_software.4.html