I'm apparently in the minority but I'm with the GP in that I've never been sure uglify and other minification was actually a great idea for this reason. The gains are marginal if you're using gzip compression (you are, right?); the loss of source readability is a big deal for the open nature.

Saying that the open web lives on through open/free software also seems dubious to me. Most SaaS don't have their offerings up on Github.

I wonder if we're about to discover yet again with the browser itself why the browser beat several cross-platform VMs.