Stylesheet languages like Sass and Less allow us to organize our stylesheets like real programming source code, in more modular and manageable ways than raw CSS ever could. Using these languages is still a young art, and I'm curious to learn how other developers use them in practice.
One of the neat features about the openness of the web is that we can learn from others by peeking at their HTML and CSS. However, these new stylesheet languages allow developers to keep their stylesheet source code private and only share the compiled CSS output. The standard compiler settings will often have the stylesheet source folder outside the public webroot.
If you use a CSS preprocessor to develop a commercial (closed-source) website, would you consider the stylesheet's source language (Sass or Less) equivalent to the CSS in terms of openness, or is it proprietary source code?
On the one hand, these languages "only" give us different syntax for writing stylesheets, so their function is the same as the CSS that's already publicly visible.
On the other hand, they could be thought of as "source code" and considered proprietary, in the same way as the Ruby or PHP that drives the site is used to generate HTML.
Looking forward to your thoughts.