S/he is NOT claiming that "open source is always good", which is the straw man you are trying to knock down.

claim: "source code is [not necessarily] tantamount to death"

you provide several counterexamples where (it seems) you think it would be tantamount to death.

But regardless of your number of examples, there only needs to be one case where it's not tantamount to death for the author's point to be valid.