Yeah, I think it can. I'm reminded of the thing in the 80s when Compaq reverse engineered and reimplemented the IBM BIOS by having one team decompile it and write a spec which they handed to a separate team who built a new implementation based on the spec.
I expect that for games the more important piece will be the art assets - like how the Quake game engine was open source but you still needed to buy a copy of the game in order to use the textures.