Open Source is not a Democracy

[The Idler]

Open Source is not a democracy (http://www.osnews.com/comments/23039)

[chegitz guevara]

So?

[Q]

From the original article (http://www.itworld.com/open-source/101641/open-source-not-democracy?source=smlynch):


Ubuntu and a vast majority of free and open source software projects, including the Linux kernel, have never been democracies. They are meritocracies, and any member of a community that thinks otherwise is kidding themselves.

Democracies are great, but they are not well-suited for product production and design. There's a reason why "designed by committee" is not a positive label: too many hands on a project with no consensus of direction leads to a pretty crappy project. Even the Debian Project, regarded as one of the most democratic of the Linux distributions, recognizes this: deciding what stays and what goes is what release managers are for.

Sure, it would be nice if Canonical took into account the contingent who clearly does not like this design change. (Note, by the way, they never ruled this option out, stating they'll look at all data before making the decision before final release.) But evidently, Canonical is sailing towards a longer-term design goal by making this change, and at the end of the day, someone needs to have their hand on the rudder steering the ship.

It's critical to recognize that open source does not bring complete democracy to software development. It never did, and it never should. Ultimately, someone in the developer chain will have to make the tough calls.

Of course, community members should take heart in knowing the converse is also true: make too many wrong calls, and community members are very free to pack up and leave. There's lots of other communities out there.

How is this bad?

[Delenda Carthago]

democracy comes from the point in which you will start a new open source programm of your own with other people that you find easy to cooperate with.

[Revy]

Ubuntu is better, apparently virus-free, faster, and freely available (you can request a free install CD, assuming your computer can handle the latest version, some old computers might not). That is why I use it.

[Raightning]

So, what you're saying is that open source can best be described as "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need"?

Sounds good to me. :D

[¿Que?]

Open source only means that the source code is publicly available. This really doesn't imply anything about how organizations which create open source are organized. Some open source software is even commercial, I believe Sun Microsystems does a lot of open source stuff. Point is, I doubt a licensing model is going to determine organizational structure, as you are generally dealing with a few different ones.

Look at what happened to Debian. They stopped shipping with firefox because they had licensing issues (I believe it was something real trivial like the logo). What happened? Debian now ships with iceweasel, essentially the same thing but nominally different.

So iceweasel is covered by a different license that firefox. Did that drastically change the organizational structure of Debian?

[pastradamus]

Dont See what this has to do with practice and propaganda. Im moving this.

[mykittyhasaboner]

So what if its "democracy" or "meritocracy", or whatever the author is trying to say, like there is even a point. The point is open source is free--and in a lot of cases provides the community with better software than corporate counterparts.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

Meritocracy is underrated.