I think the contention here is more about whether it's an open project— does it have an open bugtracker, an open project management structure, clear governance, etc.

It not having those things is fine, and eventually someone may still take the source and create an open project around it. But understanding that is a Netflix project helps calibrate people's understanding around whether the model when you find a bug is going to be "fork, fix, and run the fork indefinitely" or "fork, fix, contribution accepted, drop fork and return to upstream."