How is it awful? Can you give me a better analogy?
Because some readers might not know what is the source code. Or they might have a vague idea but they might not understand what it means for the source code to be released.
> I don’t think the concept of source code is inaccessible to laymen.
I don’t think the article claims that. On the contrary; how I see it, the article explains the concept.
A further development of the analogy would be one could try to replicate the cake mix by reading the list of ingredients and using their knowledge of baking and trial an error to replicate it as closely as possible vs getting their hands on the exact formula used by the maker of the cake mix.