RFC: FESCo Future

Callum Lerwick seg at haxxed.com
Thu Apr 27 07:45:06 UTC 2006


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.
The truth, The Right Thing, is not a democracy. No amount of sitting
around and voting is going to make 2+2=5 or make Windows not suck.

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, as the overhead and
resource contention is quite high. You'll have to swap out some other
nations...

The strongest open source projects tend to have a Benevolent Dictator
for Life.
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