On Thu, Aug 31, 2006 at 11:41:41 -0700, Josh Berkus <josh@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > In general, I think that people who harp on PostgreSQL's lack of a > benevolent dictator as an inhibitor to progress are people who are not > comfortable with democracy and are looking for excuses why company X needs > to "take over the project for its own good." I think Postgres is best described as ruled by an Oligarchy. I would expect a democracy to at least include all of the developers in votes. However when things are decided by a vote rather than consensus it is core that votes. (I think Debian would be a good example of an open source project run as a democracy.) On a related comment to that story, there have been a fair number of people stating that they think the GPL vs BSD license has been very important in getting companies to give back to the project. I think Postgres has done quite well with having companies give back code and resources to the project and makes a good counter example to these claims. There probably are some license effects, but other things also affect companies' decisions on giving back to projects they benefit from.
