Atari being the commercial firm it is, I could very well imagine that stuff was under NDA. Just 'by default', because that's what the lawyers like. And only when angry speculations emerged they could be persuaded to just openly communicate.

Or the OpenTTD guys were not the best communicators. Considering it's the OpenTTD creators live at the intersection of the groups 'programmers' and 'adults who like to play with train sets' it wouldn't be a stretch.

All in all I think this collaborative approach is very much the preferred outcome.

All those people saying 'the open web is dead' and 'people don't download from websites anymore' are exaggerating imo.