On Thu, 2006-04-27 at 02:45 -0500, Callum Lerwick wrote: > On Tue, 2006-04-25 at 12:48 +0200, Neil Thompson wrote: > > I become less and less convinced every year that democracy works in the free > > software world - you tend to end up with people who are so focussed on maintaining > > their popularity that they can't make the hard decisions - either that or marketroids > > who start impacting on the technical side of the project. > > Open source is not politics. Its software engineering. Its computer > science. Its... science! And science has nothing to do with democracy. Executing/performing a task has little to do with democracy, decision taking/finding and steering has. That's why most democratic systems apply "separation of powers". > There is a fundamental difference between an open source project and a > nation. "Cyberspace" is effectively infinite. Physical space... isn't. > One of the very cornerstones of open source is the ability to fork. > However, forking a nation is next to impossible, You're not German nor Korean? "Go over there" had been a common sentence, people being dissatisfied with West Germany's system were confronted with from right wingers, not too long ago. > The strongest open source projects tend to have a Benevolent Dictator > for Life. Any dictatorship can only work if a dictator has sufficient powers to pressurize "his people" or if he finds a sufficient number of opportunists to follow. Now guess, why many OpenSource project starve out or fork and why "dictatorships" work in "Commercial life". Ralf -- fedora-extras-list mailing list fedora-extras-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-extras-list
