[cmurf]

It's a bad idea because it's a departure from our historic common sense, as well as patents and copyrights. It's commonly accepted that when you buy a car you can learn how it works by poking it with a stick, and make modifications, and everyone expects that the things they modify they assume liability for and a warranty exemption. Code? Nope. You do not own that part of the car. You don't have the right to figure out how it work, or modify it, or even replace it. There's residual ownership in the form of IP, in perpetuity.

One of the major purposes of patent law was to make the entire details of an invention public so that it was possible to know exactly what monopoly was being granted, and also permit people to learn and invent something better. That doesn't happen when things are obscured like this.

And just because airplane code isn't published doesn't mean it's a good idea.