This wasn't a decision made based on dev input, lets be real.

This seems weirdly hostile. He laid out a bunch of points but you’re grabbing on to this one to make it seem like he’s using classic corporate-speak. Do you find it so unrealistic that the CEO of Sourcegraph has heard from devs that their managers asked them to try to clone or investigate the product before buying? That seems pretty likely

Investigating Sourcegraph's source code as part of procurement is not only plausible, but useful work that a software engineer should be happy to do.

Stating that making such evaluations impossible is a good thing is therefore more bullshit than other reasons to go closed source.

It's both hostile and, worse, boring. I know it sucks to be intrinsically less interesting than someone you disagree with passionately, but it is the case here that the CEO of the company explaining their policy shift is much more interesting than your rebuttals, which seem superficial and rote by comparison.

Someday somebody is going to be intrinsically more interesting about, like, supporting DNSSEC than me (maybe Geoff Huston will sign on and start commenting), and I'm going to want to claw my eyes out. I have empathy for where you're coming from. But can you please stop trying to shout this person down?

If we ignore the final sentence of his reason, then you might have a point. But given his reason ends with:

> This honestly was just a waste of everyone's time.

Makes it pretty clear that the benefits to Sourcegraph (I.e. not wasting time negotiating with companies acting in bad faith), was a large part of this rationale.

Besides, if you had ever tried using the OSS version of Sourcegraph, you would realise that OSS Sourcegraph is a shadow of its enterprise version. Trust me, Sourcegraph didn’t loose any sales to people running OSS Sourcegraph, and anyone who’s willing to rip out the licensing system, so they can use the enterprise features without paying, obviously isn’t going to become a paying customer either.

people can do things for more than one reason

He took the time to write out a detailed explanation of why they made a decision they did. Giving us more transparency than 99% of CEOs or companies. There is a whiff of spin there, but come on compare it to every other product decision ever made and we're getting so much more transparency.

Behavior like this means the next time a CEO will be marginally less motivated to do this. You're shitting in the commons.