[sdragon]

The key question here is: why don't they release the code under open source, or public domain, and let the internet take care of itself?

The only threat from this situation would be the botnet evolving in unforeseen ways, thus rendering the code useless. However, the vulnerability described in the article seems not a coded, but rather a conceptual one: even if storm starts to use a new protocol, they -or somebody else using the insights in the source- could repeat the disassembly process, and re-run the cleaning method.