Are there plans to open source any part of this?
We regularly discuss this :) I'm not sure yet how valuable open sourcing it will be in the long run. Part of what makes Home work well for us is how tied it is to how we actually work day-to-day -- that regularly changes as we grow and learn. As an open source project, we'd feel a commitment to keep it working for the existing user base, which might perversely hold back progress on Home and be a net negative for the community as Stripe itself tries new ways to operate.
For now, we intend to continue sharing the lessons we learn from Home and similar tools so that others can benefit from that, and to keep open sourcing it in the back of our head as we design the underlying APIs and infrastructure so we have optionality if it makes sense down the line.
You are the project owner after all, and if someone doesn't like the way you are going they can just fork it and continue on their own.
You're right tho that they could do everything you describe, i.e. publish the source code and not actually participate in any 'open source' community projects that might spring up around the code. I'm guessing that's not really that attractive to Stripe, or lots of other people. It's work just to remember to push commits to the public repo, even if you're otherwise ignoring all public communications about the project. (And ignoring all the public communications, e.g. blog posts complaining about the company not collaborating with the community, is work too.)
Still, if they are upfront about it, I don't see how it's an issue. If one of the first lines of the readme is something along the lines of "Because we believe in open source, we are making the source code publicly available for this product. We hope you may learn from it as much as we have, and perhaps adapt and use it in your own organization. However, there are currently no resources allocated towards making this a plug 'n play product for others (we are not your software development team) and therefore we will not accept pull requests or issues."
Perhaps that sounds a bit harsh in its current form, but this is just a draft of what it could say. I think the vast majority of people would understand that it is indeed unreasonable to expect them to spend money on your whims and wishes for no good reason.
They didn't open source it for other people to use, they open sources it for other people to learn.
However you have to remember that your scale, we will follow you (and fix your bugs) rather than demand you serve us.
Who knows we both might learn off each other !
I would much rather it is provided as it is. I mean No one should ever think of Open Sourcing it as a responsibility.