Source available is useful for debugging at least. I sure wish I had 'source available' when making iOS apps!

It's not.

Looking at source code without the license to copy from it ... is a legal minefield ;-)

> Source available is useful for debugging at least

how so?

I'm not the parent author, but when I developed Android applications having the source to the widget libraries available to me me was incredibly valuable.

It's being buzzworded pretty badly. I hate hearing about non-software things referred to as "open source."

The recent reaction of those developers how non-copyleft licenses are being "abused" kind of speaks otherwise.

Which reaction?

Being enranged that companies just made what MIT style licenses allow them to do to start with, and creating derived licenses to work around it.

Yeah but those enraged people don't count- those are just whiners who didn't understand the licenses they were licensing their own work under. Or they don't understand the point of FLOSS to begin with- they thought that releasing their stuff as FLOSS was some sort of business or career move that would somehow benefit them later, which is rarely ever going to happen, and will almost certainly never happen to someone who's only contributing because they think it will personally benefit them someday. To those people, a PSA- just because some CS undergrad with self-diagnosed Aspergers and a trust fund who's never had a job in their lives told you on Slashdot that putting stuff on Github will someday make you rich or famous, doesn't mean it'll happen, no matter how much everyone involved wants that to be the world we live in. There are tons of great reasons to put stuff on Github, but none of them are related to money or fame or helping one's career.

Anyway, so then, when someone else somehow makes money using their code and they don't get a cut, of course that seems like "abuse" to them. If they had any idea what they were doing they would have realized that that's not "abuse" at all, because other people using their code for any purpose whatsoever is literally the point of the license.

It's just as bad if not worse when anyone reflexively GPL's their work without understanding that, because there's a freaking holy hell of a lot more legal consequences to understand about the GPL than there are about say, 2-clause BSDL, which is basically just "this is copyrighted by me and you can't remove my copyright" and "if you use this and something goes wrong, you can't sue me". If they didn't understand such a simple license, what hope do they have of understanding the GPL? None at all whatsoever. People who've been arguing about the GPL for 20+ years rarely understand the GPL, at least not in its entirety.

There's nothing wrong with someone making their code proprietary or GPL'd or whatever- it's their code, and it's their choice to make. But it's also their responsibility to understand all the consequences of that choice, and it's their responsibility to understand why they want to release their code in the first place.