The following is not meant to be legal advice.
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Software is considered intellectual property. Typical software licenses do not make source code available to the licensee. If source code is made available, the licensee gets the source code for limited purposes such as bug fixes, interoperability.
In open source and free software licenses, the licensee may be required to make any source code for modifications available to the community. This may be done through a FTP site. For the open source licensor, the business model is usually to charge fees through services and support. RedHat is an example of the open source licensor.
Open source software, although at no charge, is not actually given away. The GPL is an example of this concept. On the Free Software Foundation web site, there is a list of licenses that are compatible with the GPL. For the products that are incompatible, it means that when the licensee incorporates GPL code with not compatible license agreements, the licensee is not able to distribute the product with the license that is not compatible.
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