[dboreham]

But wouldn't failure to achieve independent reproduction falsify the open claim?

Similar to you publish the source for Oracle (the database), but nobody can build a binary from it because it needs magic compliers or test suites that aren't open source?

Heck when the browser was open-sourced, there was an explicit test where the source was given to some dude who didn't work for Netscape to verify that he could actually make a working binary. It's a scene in the movie "Code Rush".