Relative to the world where anyone could reuse anyone else's code even for commercial purposes, having just the "source-viewable" option is placing obstacles to the entrpreneurial incentives.

Let's say you might have idea how to tweak Coldcard to make it a better product for some subset of the market, but it would take some time and money to achieve that. If you're not legally allowed to financially benefit from such new products, then you might as well just not do it, stick with your fiat job, or anything else.

On the other hand, there's similar argument as with the IP laws, that if Coinkite wouldn't have a way to protect their market position, they might have not invested their time to develop a Coldcard in the first place.

There's a ton of economic theory and real world case studies about these things, there's no chance anyone will ever settle the debates.

Imo, ultimately, open source will eat the world. But we won't get there without making some money somewhere in the meantime.