Comment by WD-42
15 hours ago
That's what I'm saying. Benevolent dictator is the rule, not the exception, in FOSS. Which is why GP's argument that private companies good, FOSS bad, makes no sense.
15 hours ago
That's what I'm saying. Benevolent dictator is the rule, not the exception, in FOSS. Which is why GP's argument that private companies good, FOSS bad, makes no sense.
I think OP is directing their ire towards projects with multiple maintainers, thus is more likely to be hamstrung by consensus building and is thus less productive. It does seem like we've been swamped with drama posts about large open-source projects and their governance, notably with Rust itself, linux incorporating Rust, Pebble, etc. It's not hard to imagine this firehose of dev-drama (that's not even about actual code) overshadowing the fact that the overwhelming majority of code ever written has a benevolent dictator model.
The argument isn't about proprietary vs open, but that design by committee, whether that committee be a bunch of open source heads that we like, or by some group that we've been told to other and hate, has limitations that have been exhibited here.