(It was later partly rejected by other courts in the DMCA anticircumvention context.)
This argument doesn't imply that companies have to help you publish your software, because they might be entitled to some kind of editorial control over which speech they do or don't distribute. But it does at least imply that the stakes of such control are very high and that free speech norms may be implicated by them!
Comments
The "software is speech" idea was popularized partly by being used (successfully) as an argument in litigation about U.S. software export controls.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_as_speech
(It was later partly rejected by other courts in the DMCA anticircumvention context.)
This argument doesn't imply that companies have to help you publish your software, because they might be entitled to some kind of editorial control over which speech they do or don't distribute. But it does at least imply that the stakes of such control are very high and that free speech norms may be implicated by them!