A major challenge in communication is to not be misunderstood. I must not have been clear enough. I never said anywhere that everything should be public. Only that I decided my code and ideas didn't need to be secret.
I think maybe commenters here are reacting more to other commenters, instead of the actual article, now.
I went and read the article, and I think it's obvious in retrospect why your point about your code is being ignored, and not just by people who haven't read the article. You start with this premise, which you appear to agree with:
I’m not worried about someone finding out my secrets, because secrets are just facts, right?
and go on to an example of a diary, one of the most personal artefacts we have, and imply that sharing it all with anyone who asks (as per the above statement) is absolutely fine. The implication of the above statement is that all secrets are pointless, including personal ones. In the context of a society in which governments and corporations are spying on every communication and looking for ways to justify it, this attitude is actively damaging and is an after-the-fact justification of that spying.
I think many people would agree with you that opening up your private code repos is a worthy thing to do, and it's certainly an idea worthy of discussion, with pros and cons (as you rightly point out, to do with maintenance and the public commitment more than anything else). The mistake in this article is relating that to personal privacy, and implying that secrets are just facts is a statement worthy of consideration.
If secrets are just facts and cannot hurt you, there is no point in keeping anything secret at all. Unfortunately other people in the world are quite capable of twisting the most mundane facts about your life (like your location at every moment, your sexual preferences, whatever), and using them to destroy your life, either because of their prejudices, or because of those of society at large. Witness politicians brought down because of some affair, or their private sex life - we don't know how many of those are leaked by our 'security services' for political gain but they certainly have done that in the past. No-one deserves that much power over others, and because of the asymmetry of power in our society, private information is far more useful to some people than others.
Perhaps that is not what you intended to imply, but that is the logical conclusion of the statement and your interpretation of it, and that's why people are reacting so strongly to it.
A major challenge in communication is to not be misunderstood. I must not have been clear enough. I never said anywhere that everything should be public. Only that I decided my code and ideas didn't need to be secret.
I think maybe commenters here are reacting more to other commenters, instead of the actual article, now.