[recursive]

I think they're more often convinced that their thing is just worth stealing. There are many such things.

[crazygringo]

Exactly this.

Apps and websites get copied all the time. Somebody throws up a duplicate with ads and steals your traffic and search rankings and customers and whatever.

Adding code to prevent your product from working when it's not on the right app/domain, and obfuscating your code to obfuscate those checks, can be sadly necessary. It doesn't need to defeat a determined attacker, but just be hard enough they'll spend their time cloning something else instead.

I speak from experience...

[t-3]

Choosing to distribute your secret sauce using tools that require source to be transmitted is kind of silly if you want to keep the source secret.

[recursive]

Secret is nice to have. But in some cases publishing is the whole point.