RFC: FESCo Future

[Ralf Corsepius]

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