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IMO the main thing they're risking by open sourcing it is adoption. Keeping it closed source is a pretty clear sign to the rest of the world that the language is not ready for widespread adoption. As soon as you open source it, even if you mark it as alpha, you'll end up with people using the language, and breaking changes will at that point break people's code.

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> language is not ready for widespread adoption.

Keeping things closed source is one way of indicating that. Another is to use a license that contains "THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED [...]" and then let people make their own choices. Just because something is open source doesn't mean it's ready for widespread adoption.

If you have users, then breaking changes will break those users. This is true regardless of how many warranty disclaimers you have.

You're describing pretty much every popular open source license here, including the Linux kernel(GPLv2). This doesn't set the expectation that things can and will break at any time. That's also not the approach maintainers take with most serious projects.

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