Open Source Is Not a Democracy

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday March 22, 2010 @05:00AM from the well-duh-people dept.

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.'"

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Re:-1 Troll by Conspiracy_Of_Doves · 2010-03-22 05:17 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

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Technoli