I think that there are various scales of &quot;open-source&quot;-ness, and these scales are moderately aligned with the abstraction layers inherent in the platform-in-use.<p>Its quite possible to share your source code with your client, who runs it, completely openly.  In fact, this is a successful model for countless decades in certain software markets, as well as a standard model of behavior, in general, in software industry.<p>The way it worked is, you&#x27;re a programmer-&gt;you write source code-&gt;the business paying you to write source code builds your code-&gt;they run it-&gt;customer.<p>However, this facet, like all other facets in the big gem of our forever-changing industry, is not as prevalent in certain software markets - for example, web&amp;etc.  There are still plenty of software developers who are in fact sharing the source - directly with their customers.  As per any one of a scale of licenses.<p>tl;dr - please don&#x27;t conflate &#x27;open source&#x27; with &#x27;F&#x2F;OSS&#x27;, et al.  If your customer owns the sources, you&#x27;ve opened your sources to them.  This is a scale, not absolute, as other ends of the scale include closed-source business models.