The mods or anybody else on this site dont care if you protect your map, everybody does it. If you are worried about the judgemental red text, well, 99% of the maps submitted here have it, so if you want to fit in, protect your map.
Maybe this is just me, but when i see an unprotected map submitted here, i tend to think that it is propably a bad map since the map creator didnt feel like it was worth protecting.
But if you want people to be able "learn" from your map but not be able to steal it, use the "open source" protection. Get vexorians optimizer to do that.