IMHO:
Distributing source code means neither loosing its ownership nor the possibility to keep the control of its evolution.
It has several advantages:
- on 'user' side: being able to better understand how things are done by looking at the code and being able to 'tune' little parts for their own speific use.
- on 'creator' side, to enhance the support by letting users suggest fixes for bugs and/or improvements instead of simple bug reports or ideas. That doesn't means the owner is forced to accept/include them. But it means less work for the 'creator' of the framework.
A good example is a framework I currently use for 'eye candy' 2D applets:
pulpCore (under LGPL license).
The
official repository is maintained only by its creator (David Brackeen). In other words, David is the only one that has got a write acces to SVN.
But users are highly encouraged to propose new features and/or bug fixes.
On my side, having the source code made:
- I have been able to suggest full fixes for some bugs I noticed.
- I have been able to 'tune' the original framework for the development of kind of personal
isometric engineTo avoid any troll: I'm not piece of "open source fanatic" and there's no value judgment on my side.
Just another point of view, nothing more.