Why?

• Help conservation of expected evidence. Hard to conserve when you don't see the whole tree of possibilities, only one branch as it plays out.
• Blinding (same rationale as pre-registered research)
• Assure others that you did not do Texas sharpshooter, data-dredge etc.

For a piece of free software to benefit society, we tend to hope it fulfils the following.

• bazaar-developed, not cathedral
• either a high bus factor, or simple enough that bus factor isn't a concern
  • in other words: if a codebase has only one developer, others must be able and willing to take over when this person developer gets hit by a bus – the more lines of code, the more important they're well-written
  • if the codebase is very big, many people should be involved in it: that's called a high bus factor
• Well-written, which eases auditing and forking

By contrast, these features are not prosocial

• cathedral-developed
• "open core"
• SaaS

OK, you have at least these two purposes in taking a note:

1. To give your future self the best possible explanation
2. To learn-by-explaining

When the source has expressed something perfectly, and you feel you can't express it better, it would seem you can only satisfy one of the above purposes.

But, you can. One tactic:

1. Forget the original phrasing (wait a day), then try again to explain
2. After that feat of production, quote the original as a second explanation