[escape_goat]

I'm not confused, I'm pointing out that the license in a private source repository changes the legal rights of the person with respect to distribution of the software defined by the contents of the repository, and than therefore a private repository with open source code inside is not a de facto closed source repository.

[Vegenoid]

> A private file repository with a closed source license is in-facto different than a private file repository with an open source license.

Yes, and "in-facto" is not the same as "de-facto".

De-facto means "describes practices that exist in reality, regardless of whether they are officially recognized by laws or other formal norms". It is not a precise term.

I have some code on my server that I wrote with an MIT license. You have no way of accessing my server, and the code has not been made available elsewhere. You can't even know that the code exists, much less that it has an MIT license. To you, it is for practical purposes the same as closed-source software, in the sense that you cannot obtain the source code of the software, despite it having an open source license. This is an applicable situation for "de facto" by its common meaning.

"Open source" is not even a precisely defined term, although people who are persnickety about the definition refer to the OSI definition, which includes "Where some form of a product is not distributed with source code, there must be a well-publicized means of obtaining the source code". By this definition, code with the MIT license held secretly in a private repo is not open source. It became open source when Roman made it public, as was his right to do by the license. The license is one component of what makes software open source, but there are other components as well.

[tga_d]

In your view, what would be an example of code that is de jure open source but de facto closed, if not a case where people have the legal ability but not the technical means to access it?

[escape_goat]

I'm rejecting the idea that software distributed in any way that has an MIT license can be "de facto" closed source. I think that this is a conceptual misapplication of the term "de facto," which implies an argument of equivalence in a situation where that equivalence does not exist. The question is not whether or not we can access the source code; we can now access the source code. The question is what the license was. To say that the license was "de facto" closed source before the software was distributed without the repository controller's knowledge or intent is to make a legal argument about that license. That argument was false. It just just as false as the argument that an electrical fire in the wall of your house that you could not see occurred 'before' your house was on file.