I think you're viewing it from the "expectations" side, while binarycrusader, pawelmurias, and I are viewing it from the "hope" side.
If this were open source under a license that makes sense to us, I think all three of us were thinking we'd like to use the code to do other things. That's just a hope.
Sure, the binary is public, but that does not imply that the author has the codebase in any shape that would be legible or maintainable by anyone but him.
Sometimes projects grow so complex that only the original author can understand it. And there are lot of examples of projects that grew too complex even for their maintainers to understand.
What I'm getting at is this: making a code public does not make it usable, and cleaning up a research/hobby codebase so it's legible can be quite an effort, and not always possible.
Hence I find it odd to yearn for something you have no idea if it's worth yearning for. Unless one is an afficionado of masochism there are usually much more rewarding things to do than deobfuscate code someone else wrote.
