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Open Source Is Not a Democracy
itwbennett writes "A recent kerfuffle within the Ubuntu community serves as a reminder of an inconvenient truth: open source is not a democracy, writes blogger Brian Proffitt. 'The discussion started innocuously enough, within Bug #532633 in light-themes (Ubuntu) on Launchpad, where the order of the window controls within the Light theme were requested to be re-arranged to be on the upper right side of any given window. Light, it seemed, now placed the buttons on the left side, similar to the Mac OS X interface.' The discussion turned into an argument and culminated in this exchange in which Mark Shuttleworth lays down the law:
'It's fair comment that this was a big change, and landed without warning. There aren't any good reasons for that, but it's also true that no amount of warning would produce consensus about a decision like this... No. This is not a democracy. Good feedback, good data, are welcome. But we are not voting on design decisions.'"
Democracy is a really nice word but it's meaning is amorphous at best. Usually it is used to give the Westerners among us (myself included) a warm fuzzy. I don't want anything made by committee. Open source is more free market than democratic: if it works it survives and if it doesn't it dies.
This article seems like a gigantic troll.
Open source is communism, not democracy. All are equal, but some are more equal than others :)
I love how a lot of comments are all about this is how decisions should be made, just one person at the top gets the final say - period.
Makes it clear, I think. I'll keep on keeping out of F/OSS, thank you very much. I'm not going to waste my time contributing to someone else's dictatorship, benevolent or otherwise.
Communism and democracy are not at odds with each other.
Communism is an economic system. Democracy is a political system.
It's possible for a system to be both. In fact, a genuine communist system would have to be democratic.
Technoli
From http://interviews.slashdot.org/story/10/03/02/186206/Matt-Asay-Answers-Your-Questions-About-Ubuntu-and-Canonical?from=rss
:-)
Adoption stories and influences
by eldavojohn (898314)"Every so often I see an adoption story about so-and-so taking up some open source solution and sometimes I think 'Wow, French government? Now it's really going to take off. This is it. It's time.' And then I wait. And wait. Are these stories at all positive for the project? I mean, you would think with states and governments using Ubuntu or Red Hat that it would catch on like wildfire if the savings are there so why isn't that happening? I know Microsoft sends out a lot of Wormtongues to stick in the ears of important people. Do you plan on targeting governments in a similar manner? Does/will Canonical work on making a presence in things like the EU Commissions where we've seen corporations collecting members in their pockets?"
Matt: No, we have no plans to turn Wormtongue. We do, however, have aspirations to play Frodo.
In the end, Frodo proved just as corruptible as Gollum, Wormtongue, the Ringwraiths, etc. I would rather have Canonical have aspirations to play Samwise. In today's story, Shuttleworth seems to be closer to Ilsildur.