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Perhaps it's being open sourced because there's no longer a market for this sort of thing.

It's been free before. It's not that we made money with it.

Some people feel it discourages unskilled reversers from poking around.

I'm sure it does but that isn't very valuable IMHO.

It can be - if you have client side code that you do not wish people to mess around with it's all about adding resistance to convince the person who attempts that it's not worth the time and effort.

Some examples:

- Licensing logic

- Anti-cheating for games and similar

Most likely it will be breached eventually, but no reason to leave the door unlocked.

yGuard seems to focus mainly on removing dead code and emitting small names, so this looks like size optimization.