Brodie Robertson: Open Source Software Is Not A Democracy
It's never claimed to be a democracy. It's not a monolith, either. Some projects have forms of input and/or voting, most don't because it's just a few people writing software that they want to write.
Get over yourself if you think that people working for free should be required to listen to you. Just as in anything else, pay them if you want a guaranteed response.
Otherwise, recognize that the key element of Open Source is that you have the source code. If a project isn't doing what you want then fork it and build it yourself. That's the whole point of this community and philosophy.
I won't watch this clickbait, but forks who succeed the prior are exactly what we call democracy.
I won’t watch this clickbait
Are you referring the title here on Lemmy (ported from YouTube), or are you referring to any video, in general, that uses this practice? If it's the latter, why punish the creator? The need for clickbait is more of an environmental requirement for success created by YouTube. I can't fault a creator for trying to succeed.
forks who succeed the prior are exactly what we call democracy.
Hm. Democracy, by definition, is rule by the majority. A smaller fork gradually becoming larger and more successful than the prior, thereby eating up a larger chunk of the market, is really more of an example of competition. The larger fork doesn't have any say over the smaller forks. It is somewhat of an analogy to democracy, perhaps, in that people "vote with their feet" by moving to the fork that they want to succeed, but it breaks down in that you don't have one, or the other — both can exist in tandem.
Sounds more like anarchism than democracy.
Is that a bad thing? Why is it a problem that you, personally, haven't heard the argument before?
It's not a representative democracy. It's direct democracy, like anarchistic communes.
It’s direct democracy
Maybe some projects, but that certainly can't be said for all open source projects. Also note that "open source" in "open source software" is simply the license that makes it so. This idea of governance is more of a project issue than a software distribution issue.
Wouldn't it technically be anarchy?
Hm, it depends on the context. Any open source project, or fork thereof would be an independent isolated instance with it's own practices — e.g. authoritarian, anarchist, democratic, etc.
I’m so tired of seeing his clickbait thumbnails on here all the time
Neither was that YouTube video 🤷🏻♂️
Correct...? I'm not sure what your point is.
Open Source is democratic through natural selection.
I like your idea of "natural selection" for OSS, but I'm not sure I understand the parallel that you are drawing between democracy and natural selection. Would you mind elaborating?
Projects that have a big community tend to last longer. If the project does things that alienate the users, the community shrinks, thus endangering the prohect's future. The community can mean desktop users or businesses, doesn't matter. My point is, users have a saying, wether devs like it or not.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/watch?v=gphY5Okx_vs
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=gphY5Okx_vs
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
