It's interesting, because in some fashion the private industry has a practice which is designed to prevent against software obsolescence or the failure of their vendor company: Code Escrow.

I would love to see a nonprofit/NGO/TLA dedicated to getting such defunct tech open sourced. I am sure lots of great stuff gets archived in hopes of selling/licensing the IP later, and then it never sees the light of day again. To the extent such things get archived at all.

This came up in another thread here the other day in fact. And before the same guy chimes in to suggest that governments ruin everything they take on because of corruption: You're still wrong, and you can take that defeatism elsewhere.