It was never open source before apple. Rather the binary was freely available to be used. When apple bought them they took it away but continued to support customers with contracts. In that way it was inaccessible until it was open sourced.

... which both state that it wasnt open-source before the apple buyout.

I'm sorry I mis-remembered the exact details of another team that I didn't work on and tech stack from 8 years ago. I'll go give myself 100 hail Marys.

The point wasn't to bash Apple - the point was that the team lost a lot of money and time and shipped and inferior product because Apple chose to purchase and close down part of the stack.