Comment by aeldidi

Rather than "Source Code is Worthless", I find it makes more sense to think of the lesson learned here as "Source Code is Only Worth Something to the Public if it's Well Documented and Stable", which happens to be true more often in practice.

For example, someone I used to know would always say that while the Linux kernel as a product (a free and open source operating system) is priceless, the source itself is worthless unless you have an understanding of its internals, and I think that this is generally true for codebases of similar size and complexity, although I'd argue Linux specifically doesn't fall into this area only because of the fact that drivers make up most of the code in it.

Stability is especially important when considering long term worth of code. When youtube-dl was removed from GitHub not too long ago, people were worried that the project would stop being updated and maintained, despite the fact that mirrors of the source code were everywhere. In that case, because the project needs constant updating and maintaining to keep up with websites like YouTube who have no incentive to continue to keep a stable API for downloading videos.