rwwmike

It was definitely a major thing. But in this discussion, the main points we even focused on about the characteristics of open source when defining it were the same as the FSF:

"When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes."

The bigger part of the "how we got here" was actually that GitHub ended up creating this ecosystem where collaboration was so open and easier to use to a larger population that we ran into an unintended consequence: maintainers being overwhelmed.

The overall history was intentionally a very quick, broad brush stroke to move into the points that pertained to someone feeling like they had to close their project to contributions.

> I realise that this is intentionally a very highly-compressed version of history, but

Author here. As you say, it's a highly-compressed version of history. Getting into the finer points of the evolution of open source wouldn't really have had any bearing on the rest of the article.

For Anton Mirgorodchenko, a Ukrainian refugee born with cerebral palsy, supported eye tracking hardware is too expensive, and speech-to-text isn’t an option—it doesn’t understand him. Instead, he uses a physical keyboard, despite his disability.

“Do you know how to type parentheses with one finger?” he asks. “Holding down shift with your nose.”

That hasn’t stopped him. He’s worked as a freelance developer since earning his Master’s degree in Computer Maintenance and Networks in 2012, and recently, he started exploring how to use ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot to better communicate and write code. Our emails provided a particular delight, as he likely realized a similar point—not long ago, our communication would be improbable, if not nearly impossible.

“Just imagine: I'm responding to you in Ukrainian and omitting about 60% of the letters from the words, but ChatGPT understands what I am saying and provides an answer in English,” he wrote in an email. He offered an example of how he composed a sentence.

Mirgorodchenko: h m n s Antn, m f ukr. im dev w cplsy.

ChatGPT: I think you are trying to say: "Hi, my name is Anton. I'm from Ukraine. I'm a developer with cerebral palsy.

Ahh, good call. They're both on there now.

Thanks, I really enjoyed writing it!

And yeah, as I talked to everyone for the article, it really seemed that minimalism was relative to where you were, and could often show up these days in using managed services. Such is the power of the cloud, right?

I didn't go there, but I think lots of things like serverless and edge workers and stuff like that could fit into this discussion as well.

I dunno, do you?

Thanks for the much-more-useful explanation here. I thought the question was a complaint about verbing a name, not being unfamiliar.

Author here. I really enjoyed diving into this topic and interviewing people. Minimalism in technology has a long history, and it's as important today as it's ever been. A favorite quote from the story, from Carson Gross, who made htmx:

“I might encourage minimalism in web development, but only because there's this incredibly complicated piece of software called a browser that has all this infrastructure baked into it that we can sit on top of. We can take advantage of that complexity and the abstraction it provides in a simple way, rather than putting a lot of complexity on top of that,” says Gross. “A lot of JavaScript projects take a browser and heap a bunch of incredibly complicated software on top without taking advantage of the infrastructure that the browser has sitting there.”

Author here. Yep, someone's name, verb-ified. I fully get the pet peeve against this sorta thing, but we went there nonetheless. :)