Distribution of source code for products that others use to develop software is very useful to those developers and does not need to be harmful to the vendor. Source code for products such as games where I don't rely on knowing the intimate details of how they work is of limited interest to me. Free software is interesting, especially from an intellectual viewpoint of challenging our ideas of IP and commerce. But in my professional life I don't care if I have the right to modify and then sell or give away someone's code, just understand it and occasionally modify for my own use, giving back any generally useful modifications.
I spent 5 years developing applications with Smalltalk and one of the things that made that an enjoyable experience (besides the merits of the language) was the culture of Smalltalk vendors and other developers making source available. It allowed me to see examples of Smalltalk code and learn and adapt ideas for my own uses. It allowed me to understand the system much better than any documentation could. It allowed me to step through all the code at the source level, not just the application code I had written. Occasionally, it allowed me to find bugs in their code and it always helped me determine whether my application's misbehaviour was my bug or theirs. On the rare occasions when it was their bug, we were able to send their support staff enough detail to quickly get a fix or, more often, we were able to actually send the fix along with the bug report. We were happy to do this because we wanted the fix included in the next release of their product. We never felt the vendor should fix anything that we had done.
I wasn't interested in taking all their code to create a rival Smalltalk development product and I don't think anyone else did any wholesale copying either. I wouldn't have been interested in buying a Smalltalk product which was just a copy of another vendor's because I want a relationship with the innovator, not the copier.
The situation is somewhat similar with Java (to a lesser extent). There is less source freely available for Java (e.g. not the compiler) but much of the code I care about can be had.
So, I'm making a distinction of what source code I want made available based on whether it would be useful to me. I would like to see operating systems, languages, and development environments with source code available (others might want device drivers). I don't think the vendor should charge extra for the source. And I think that although vendors may have the fears you mention, they are wrong.
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Distribution of source code for products that others use to develop software is very useful to those developers and does not need to be harmful to the vendor. Source code for products such as games where I don't rely on knowing the intimate details of how they work is of limited interest to me. Free software is interesting, especially from an intellectual viewpoint of challenging our ideas of IP and commerce. But in my professional life I don't care if I have the right to modify and then sell or give away someone's code, just understand it and occasionally modify for my own use, giving back any generally useful modifications.
I spent 5 years developing applications with Smalltalk and one of the things that made that an enjoyable experience (besides the merits of the language) was the culture of Smalltalk vendors and other developers making source available. It allowed me to see examples of Smalltalk code and learn and adapt ideas for my own uses. It allowed me to understand the system much better than any documentation could. It allowed me to step through all the code at the source level, not just the application code I had written. Occasionally, it allowed me to find bugs in their code and it always helped me determine whether my application's misbehaviour was my bug or theirs. On the rare occasions when it was their bug, we were able to send their support staff enough detail to quickly get a fix or, more often, we were able to actually send the fix along with the bug report. We were happy to do this because we wanted the fix included in the next release of their product. We never felt the vendor should fix anything that we had done.
I wasn't interested in taking all their code to create a rival Smalltalk development product and I don't think anyone else did any wholesale copying either. I wouldn't have been interested in buying a Smalltalk product which was just a copy of another vendor's because I want a relationship with the innovator, not the copier.
The situation is somewhat similar with Java (to a lesser extent). There is less source freely available for Java (e.g. not the compiler) but much of the code I care about can be had.
So, I'm making a distinction of what source code I want made available based on whether it would be useful to me. I would like to see operating systems, languages, and development environments with source code available (others might want device drivers). I don't think the vendor should charge extra for the source. And I think that although vendors may have the fears you mention, they are wrong.