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The coders say they simply want to benefit from their work, rather than having others clone it and gain rewards from it. I can understand that, it's the same reason that steemocean is closed source.

Its like Windows OS closed sourced right?
I prefer open source.

Yes. Generally, open source is preferable, but when a project is small and one person has put a lot of time into it without any payout, I don't see that it is wrong for them to keep the code closed. The code can be opened later if need be. So far no-one has actually asked me for the code to steemocean anyway.

I guess those huge delegators to steem-ua already know the code because they wont be delegating that much if they won't reveal the code.

I don't know. Maybe.