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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.'"
Because everyone is a programmer, right? And everyone is intimately familiar with everyone else's code bases and every library, UI toolkit etc that are also used, right? Yeah, except for these quite high barriers to entry, yes everyone can go about fixing other people's code.
Troll? WTF. That's one of the lamest moderation ever. Not only am I correct, I was pretty polite about it.
I would love for someone to point out exactly why my post would be a troll? What exactly am I trolling for?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I looked it up.
Democracy is not defined in a standard way. The things common to all definitions are equality and freedom.
Anarchy is undemocratic, because for practical purposes, in an anarchic state, the strong rule the weak. For example, if I don't like Shuttleworth's tree, in anarchy, I can shoot him, unless he shoots me first.
Meanwhile, in the modern world, an open source project is utterly democratic, because everyone gets one voice, and no one can suppress it.
Tired of Political Trolls? Opt Out!
Democracy or not. If you don't do what the people want your project will not succeed. Just today I got a back a rather snide response to a bug I put in 6 months ago (expecting to know what package was causing a problem on all my applications). My response was after upgrading to Windows 7 it seem to fix all the problems.
Which is true, After going to windows 7 I have been having a lot less problem then with Linux. Linux has been falling behind and it is mostly due to the key people not wanting to listen to its users. Either expecting them to be idiots or whiny.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.