Source available is a no man's land. People who want source code also want MIT (or similarly permissible license). People who don't care about source, don't care if it's available.
To some extend. Projects that are “open-source” but not MIT piss me off because they make my life harder.
I know that’s not strictly fair, but nonetheless true.
But it is weird that just MIT seems to be acceptable to him, I would think some BSD licenses variant would be OK as well. But maybe even an acknowledgement of the hard work of others is too much to ask for...
When the source is available, I need to carefully consider what the license is, and if it’s anything other than MIT I’ll have to go through a whole approval process to use the thing. Any experience with corporate means you know the thing cannot be used if you value your sanity.
I just fundamentally believe that making the source available should be the same as making it free/unencumbered. If you need the legal system to enforce your license for you something is going wrong.
Presuming the customer is a single person. Plenty of business software is sold as proprietary with some source available pieces -- where the business doesn't care about the license, but IT wants to maintain/adjust/integrate the customizable parts.