I wish people would do historical arguments better

Does anyone actually make these arguments? I can easily see someone arguing that if you trust your developers then making them make pull requests instead of just allowing them to push changes is an unnecessary extra step (or two). But how could anyone argue that a tool designed for a low-trust environment must be unsuitable for a high trust environment simply because of its origin? Couldn't such an argument be refuted by saying "that's just stupid"?

And who says the web should not be used for apps?

Interesting, sort of like a reverse chesterton's fence argument: just because a thing used to be used to do x, doesn't mean that's the only purpose it could possibly serve.

> Open source was originally coined to be palatable to corporations, so we should write Free software instead.

I wish he had addressed this one in the article, because this is a situation where the history is really relevant. There is an important and contentious history of debate about what those terms really mean (one possible position in that debate is that the difference doesn't matter, but there are others).

Unlike pull requests or linked list interview questions there really is no reason to prefer one over the other except to express a philosophical point of view which will depend on your interpretation of history.

It's funny, they share in common the recognition of the telos of of the thing.

I wanted to call them teleological arguments, but I'm afraid that name has already been thoroughly used for other purposes.

Well, of course you can repurpose things. But you better have a good answer for "why are doing this again?", because any pointer to good practices, or people having success doing it is now completely irrelevant.

You "make" an argument, you don't "do" it