> I always wonder why people bother with providing source under a source available license. [..] There's little to no benefit to outside users. Any work they do on the code is effectively free work they do for you that entitles them to nothing.

Don't need to make PRs to benefit from the source being available. Running software whose source code has been under public eyeballs, and that I have compiled myself (or that a trusted third-party has compiled) is far more secure than running a binary blob that may or may not do what the developer's marketing page promises.

> If something like Bun (recently acquired by anthropic) becomes orphaned, we'd still have the git source code and a permissive license.

Closed-source apps have had source-code escrow clauses for a long time, exactly to avoid that problem. "If my company shuts down, you get all the source code and can do whatever you want with it."

Such clauses can, and should, be brought over to source-available licenses, where they would also be trivial since you don't even need a physical escrow.