Thanks Captain Obvious.
Maybe there are legal reasons why he isn't considering selling the project. If he was willing to sell it, I'm sure he'd written it in the shutdown notice.
And what does this have to do with your suggestion of "just giving it away for free"?
As you just stated, writing the code behind the exchange consumed multiple hundred, possibly even thousands of hours of work. Why should that just go to waste if it can't be sold?