Comparing software projects to governments usually produces the wrong intuition. The stakes are much lower, and risk tolerance should be much higher with a software project. Dictators are good, forks are good, even conflict can be good because it means people care. On the contrary, democracy leads to mediocre decisions, designs by committee, and sluggishness.

Unlike with a government, you can easily walk a way from a software project or create a fork. There is almost zero friction to "voting with your feet" in software and it works.

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purple_turtle 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Open source software project captured by evil people in the worst case results in a lot of confusion and annoyance.

Countries captured by evil people in the worst cases that result in millions of dead people.

Entirely different risks are acceptable.

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gwbas1c 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> There is almost zero friction

Building consensus around which fork to use is going to be a high-friction process; it's going to require much more work than pushing the "fork" button and changing the name in all the assets.

	▲	alphazard 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I don't think the consensus is really necessary. Right now we live in a world where version control and patch management is still pretty high cost. That leads to fewer active forks of each open source project. As the technology improves, I expect us to move to a world where each project is actually a cloud of forks. So instead of rebranding every time there's a fork of XYZ software, we just refer to the forks by the name of the maintainer. e.g. I use Chad McProgrammer's XYZ. It seems like some people want unity and sameness for its own sake, or to enforce their vision of a project on the users. I just want the software to work as close to my ideal as possible, and am willing to shop around maintainers to find the one that I personally consider the best. Why would you compromise if you don't have to?
	▲	6 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		[deleted]
	▲	j-bos 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Then make something so much better it's worth it to use. This is code, code is purpose driven first and foremost.

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antonvs 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Unlike with a government, you can easily walk away

Part of me hopes for a Snow Crash future where if you don't like the services provided by The American Mafia (a bit of on-the-nose prophecy from Neal Stephenson), you can switch to Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong instead. Sadly, human rights would likely be a casualty in that overall scenario.