Maybe I don't want to release source inadvertently without appropriate license. Maybe I don't want people to do with my code however they want without some stipulations or restrictions. There are reasons for anything.
Sometimes people are a little cavalier and think it is just public domain and they can legally do whatever they want.
In my opinion, I don't want some artificial force forcing my work to be effectively public domain without my approval. If I use some part that is GPL then it is an approval that any part subjected to GPL must follow the GPL but I wouldn't necessarily want everything to be auto-assumed.
Websites under law in many countries are automatically copyrighted by virtue of the Berne Convention and international treaties and inter-nation policies and agreements regarding copyright. Therefore, even if the source is visible, copying parts of if not significant portions of a website maybe a copyright violation. A web-based video game (site and video game service) for example as well as the overall business websites and other portions of a website is usually copyrighted yet people often steal or plagiarize or otherwise disregard the copyright because they don't care. If it is easy for them to re-implement, they will do so. Mix, advance client-side and advance server side elements will help impede full copying over because they don't get all of the pieces to successfully duplicate your work.
This is why I am not a fan of some of the extremist views on Free Open Source movements. There is a world where you need to work in both proprietary and open source. Just as we work real jobs and may also volunteer on our time off. Open source isn't intended for people to make their living and income from. It's meant to be a sort of volunteer work or otherwise for gratis. In other words, done for the greater good of society. You still have to have a working job in a commercial business whether as an employee or as business owners.
I've heard sentiments demonizing commercial business and business activity where they're trying to earn an income from the work. Duh. Businesses have to legally pay for the hours employees worked. It's not optional. There is no such thing as volunteering for a for-profit entity. It is not legal. If an employee worked on a project of your business, you have to pay for it. If you object to the employee spending too much time, then you may have to consider laying off that employee, terminating that employee's employment, or shifting them down to part-time status or otherwise make decisions to control or limit hours spent. Sometimes, employees are salaried to a level where overtime rates no longer apply and they are paid a fixed salary whether they work 40 hours a week or they work 100 hours a week.
When I look at WebAssembly, this is a system that can facilitate various interests of proprietary works but also if you want to open source something, you can release it in a similar manner as other open-source software where you have a binary release and also the source. Provide a link for people to download the source code if they so want it.
However, lets remember that for the most part, most websites are in fact proprietary and it is not really intended to be "open source" because the work is copyright. When you have software that runs through the browser, is it not really the intent of that kind of software such as video games to be proprietary by companies with employees that needs to be paid so they can have food on the table and pay the bills as well as the business owners. There are some individuals with the "FREE as in free beer" when taken to the logical extreme doesn't work in the real world where not everything is free.
There is a lot of plagiarism on the web where people take each other's code. If you are in business where you make money from your site such as Software As A Service model business or online video game service business, if someone copy and pasted your web site and removed all elements of payment for given services, that ripoff will undermine your sales because if given a choice, people will not pay for something they can get for free.
If you're working full-time as a business and/or as an employee of such business, you're livelihood is dependent on successful return on the investment of time. You don't have time to work another job to support your family and there is not a welfare system sufficient to support the world's population. There isn't even enough financial resources to support those in need so undercutting by shortcutting, plagiarizing, stealing and doing nothing unique and innovative or otherwise develop an original work only serves to erode the ability for people to make sufficient meaningful living with sufficient financial resources to raise a family. It isn't coming from the government.
A programmer who really has the level of ability to understand the architecture of a computer hardware as intimately and as in depth as machine language programmers would have, the same kind of person can potentially write the code of WASM directly. This requires a special discipline and perhaps tenacity to bear it. After all, there is a reason not everyone is in programming in machine language or assembly language.
WebAssembly is kind of like a virtual assembly language of a sort that can be represented in a semi-human readible textual format, similar to a disassembly listing of native machine code to the 'mneumonic' format of opcodes vs. the hexadecimal representation.
For a number of us who has literally worked in machine language level (mostly on older processors such as 6502/6510 & other 65xx based processors found in Apple II, Commodore 64, NES, Super Nintendo (65c816 cpu), Motorola 68K series processors found in Commodore Amiga and early pre-PowerPC Apple Macintosh line of computers, 8088/8086/80186/80286/80386... series of Intel processors found in IBM PC and Compatibles running MS-DOS and previous versions of Windows (1.x, 2.x, 3.x, 95, 98, NT,....)), well..... most of them are familiar with working this way so the idea isn't so alien. If you understand the language... even in the byte code format which it is technically a language, you'll understand how it works and how the code works regardless of how it is presented to it. Even in native machine code if you understand the underlying ISA (instruction set architecture) and the machine language and architecture.
Sometimes people are a little cavalier and think it is just public domain and they can legally do whatever they want.
In my opinion, I don't want some artificial force forcing my work to be effectively public domain without my approval. If I use some part that is GPL then it is an approval that any part subjected to GPL must follow the GPL but I wouldn't necessarily want everything to be auto-assumed.
Websites under law in many countries are automatically copyrighted by virtue of the Berne Convention and international treaties and inter-nation policies and agreements regarding copyright. Therefore, even if the source is visible, copying parts of if not significant portions of a website maybe a copyright violation. A web-based video game (site and video game service) for example as well as the overall business websites and other portions of a website is usually copyrighted yet people often steal or plagiarize or otherwise disregard the copyright because they don't care. If it is easy for them to re-implement, they will do so. Mix, advance client-side and advance server side elements will help impede full copying over because they don't get all of the pieces to successfully duplicate your work.
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