Comment by ano-ther
10 months ago
What’s the backstory?
> There was no real progress in negotiations with Organic Maps shareholders.
> It appears that Viktor is only open to a guarantee not to sell the project, however besides that he wants to retain full control of Organic Maps.
> And Organic Maps future is uncertain still, as the disagreement between shareholders (Viktor and Roman) has not been resolved.
Looks like this is the backstory: https://www.comaps.app/news/2025-04-16/1/
I'm more partial to a BDFL than a committee, so I'm not sure why I'd prefer this fork. Community management is not a de facto improvement.
I'd have agreed with you a year ago, but the WordPress debacle shows that the BDFL concept really hangs on the "benevolent" part of the job description. If your BDFL goes rancid your only option is to fork, and hostile forks are very difficult to pull off because it almost invariably forks the community.
The BDFL archetype is basically Plato's philosopher king. It's a nice and appealing idea in theory, and works well if you get a good one (Matz for Ruby, by all accounts). But it's risky, and it's hard to be sure yours is actually benevolent and will stay benevolent.
The philosopher king analogy doesn’t hold water because forking is an option.
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BDFL is a good concept. As long as money stays out of it. If the DFL collects money in a for profit Organisation and isn't transparent about usage, this is unsatisfactory to other contributors.
I am not sure there is a huge market for selling the company, though, given the track record of the owners for taking the money and then forking away and trying to pull the users over.
It sounds like the problem is that they don't trust the BDFL to be B, since they're asking for more financial transparency and a bunch of other stuff.
I could have been a BDFL for a project that I authored, but chose against that.
I often say that the best thing that I ever did for the project, was walk away from it. The team that took it over, has made it extremely successful.