I can't speak for them, but in our case we had major users who required open-source (mostly European govt. projects).
All our developers wanted to just post the source online and be done with it, but our boss had security concerns he wanted us to address first -- so in the meantime we gave people who needed it GPL'ed copies, and asked them politely not to redistribute until we were ready.
All our developers wanted to just post the source online and be done with it, but our boss had security concerns he wanted us to address first -- so in the meantime we gave people who needed it GPL'ed copies, and asked them politely not to redistribute until we were ready.