The impetus for open sourcing the game was that I started a new git repo for my Airships prototype and wanted to host it on GitHub. Since I don't want to pay for a bigger account, and because I can't be bothered moving to BitBucket, one of the existing private repos had to become public. Patent Blaster was the natural choice.
Releasing it as open source like that isn't meant to say "oh well, have it for free". If formerly paid games become free within half a year of their release, that sends a pretty strong signal that there's no reason to buy it when you can just wait. This does not make for a healthy indie games scene., and it's not something I want to do. So It's true that with the released code and assets you can build your own copy of the game, but you still need the time and skills to do it - if you do, go ahead!
In the reddit post on the open sourcing I described the game as "highly unsuccessful", which wasn't really specific enough - the game has been a commercial failure, but it is a success in the sense that it's complete, I liked making it, like playing it, and learned a lot about game development in the process. Nor was calling the code "fairly straightforward" meant to be negative as much as trying to reassure potential readers that they would be able to follow it.
Finally, I felt that having more code to look at and learn from can only be a good thing for the game development community. When you're starting out with anything, having something to tinker with and copy-paste from is very helpful. And later on, it's extremely interesting to see how other people solve things like code structure, IO, animation, AI, and so on.
So don't worry, enjoy the code, and stay tuned for more things!