alt Hacker NewsIn the past, we've done that because we've tended to do large refactors, many of which we've backed out of. For that reason, we've kept our own internal development version, which is ahead of the public version. Then when whatever we're developing is ready for public use, then we open source it
I'm not sure I follow the reasoning here, sorry.
Why not keep that internal version as a dev branch separate from main? I can see the appeal of keeping things out of master/main for a while, but not why you would keep that part of development hidden.
But most importantly, why let out the binary and not the source? presumably if something is not ready for public use, the artifact being out is worst of both worlds - unready code is out and the public can't check what it does.
Not trying to argue mind you, but if this was not a deliberate attempt to hide the binary's behavior I think I'm missing the alternative upsides that justify that flow.