[rwwmike]

> 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.

[dancemethis]

Honestly, it is not possible to perceive it as being written in good faith.

[Karellen]

I suppose we'll just have to respectfully disagree about which precursors are "finer points of evolution" and which are "major foundational cornerstones" of Open Source.

[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.

[prepend]

Highly compressing out the most important part of open source is kind of funny. Especially since you call out the person who arguably coined the phrase.

Also, this is your readme so it’s not like you have some editor pressuring you to cut down.