It's a mixture of things, some philosophical and some practical.
I live in a very rural area with poor cell phone coverage. I'm happy to provide a WiFi signal for the lost people who are in front of my house trying to figure out why their GPS has led them here. We get a few each year, because Google Maps shows the road past my house going through while in reality it's closed in winter.
I also like it that I don't need to play the "what's the password" game with houseguests. I like that I don't need to input passwords to screenless devices using clumsy and slow input methods. I like the idea that the default should be sharing what you can afford to share rather than keeping everything private by except by special arrangement.
More generally, I don't think that closed networks substantially improve security and I don't like the push to require them. It's great to have the option to keep people off of your network through passwords or MAC filtering, but I don't like it being the default. I don't like technology that tries to enforce its own opinion about social norms.
Contrary to the other poster, it's not laziness. At this point it's frequently more difficult to host an open network than a password protected one. It might not be a good idea, but it's a conscious choice.
You could always run two wifi network SSIDs (depending on your gear I guess). Then you have the ability to have open wifi for guests, but also keep your other devices on a segregated network as an extra layer in your personal security profile.
I definitely could, and technically it would be easy. This is probably the way most people would solve this. But I don't because I don't like giving in to opinionated technology. But I may end up doing so if I eventually encounter a home appliance where I really do want to connect to it.
These are all practical reasons, not really philosophical. Unless any form of logic is philosophical but then everything is.
If your claiming your philosophical stance is setting passwords doesn’t provide security, by your own reasoning in your case that’s just a matter of practicality. There is no philosophical argument.
> More generally, I don't think that closed networks substantially improve security and I don't like the push to require them.
I mean that’s just your opinion, not a philosophical stance, and it happens to be a empirically demonstrably false one.
> I don't like technology that tries to enforce its own opinion about social norms.
This statement is so vague it’s practically useless. It can just be selectively applied against anything you don’t like. All technology is opinionated. From the layout of your keyboard to this site, everything is shaped by and shapes social norms. It would also be an opinionated technology if it decided not to ask you to set a password by default. You might as well have said I don’t like WiFi passwords because I don’t like WiFi passwords and it would’ve carried the exact same message.