I think this is likely going to be true unfortunately, but I also feel like the title is more than a bit misleading. (The title at Ars is identical to the title of the thread here)

I didn’t see anything in this article indicating that Spotify has made any direct comments on whether they were going to open source it or not. From the article, it also sounds like refunds haven’t been publicly stated as the official solution from spotify, but instead just something some people have managed to get spotify support personnel to approve. In fact, it’s stated that Spotify specifically ‘declined to confirm’ that refunds were the official solution.

They might not need to open-source it: hackers have found ways of jailbreaking the installed Linux and are stepping up efforts for making it reusable. It’s a rather feeble SoC, so there won’t be a huge number of applications for it, but there will be some.