Since no one is saying anything regarding what actually happened, I SUSPECT (as in SPECULATE) that SlySoft ***may*** have entered into a contract with AACS-LA. Remember that AACS has tried everything including a successful lawsuit in Antigua to shut them down, all of which did not result in SlySoft closing down.
It is **possible** that a legally binding contract was made in Antigua that offered SlySoft something (probably not money... perhaps the promise not to carry out some kind of threat which we can only speculate on). **IF** that is the case, then it may have stipulated that SlySoft "black box" all code, which would mean we will NOT see any kind of source code being made public, databases being made public, or the product coming back under some other name from some other company. (Or SlySoft being able to talk about the deal in any way for that matter.)
Of course THAT IS ALL SPECULATION.
One reason I think it's happening now might be related to the first 4K discs starting to ship, removing SlySoft from decrypting them as they're the ones most likely to do it the soonest. But also and more importantly I think is simply declining sales. It's likely just a smart business decision by SlySoft to shut down now with whatever assets they have and whatever a possible contract might have gotten them, than stay in business with sales trends showing that you'd have to go out of business anyways within the next few years.
Since everything is the property of SlySoft, then they have the ultimate control over any decision or deal that they make, so if they accepted a contract to box it, that's their decision.
The only thing one could HOPE for, I think, is that the SlySoft developers (the people who actually wrote the code) didn't sign any contracts, and are free to go to work for some other company, BUT, they would have to COMPLETELY write new code and a new program from the ground up, basically the equivalent of not violating any of SlySoft's copyrights, which might be pretty hard to do since many of AnyDVD's patches and fixes were unique.