This is XC's stance on open source:

XC is committed to the open source model. Open source code is vital for the health and advancement of cryptographic technologies, and it is a privilege to share our technical breakthroughs with a community such as this. We believe that XC's code embodies several world-firsts enabling anonymity that is scalable, mobile-friendly, POS-integrated, and is ultimately a platform upon which a broad range of Blockchain 2.0 technologies will be built. However we have been under severe attack from competing projects. Furthermore people’s faith in altcoins is significantly hindered by clones. Therefore we believe that the ethical way to engage with the community is to make code available on a delayed timeline. This way, the community will still benefit from our work, while we'd reduce the incentive for developers to flood the marketplace with clones that lack a long term future and reduce the trustworthiness of the altcoin phenomenon. XC represents several market-leading innovations, and we are honoured to make these available to the community in the near future.