It isn't amazing when you see how it tends to work out for those who succeed in a corporate context.

There is a natural competition to become an "idea person" in an organization. If the project goes well, the idea person gets the credit. If the project goes poorly, the people who actually built it get the blame. And it takes far less work to produce promising ideas, than to actually build stuff. The result is that succeeding in getting other people to implement your ideas becomes a fast track to promotion. Unfortunately, the farther that you get from the actual implementation, the worse your ideas get. Compounding that is the fact that the ideas that convince executives far too often are the ones that play buzzword bingo in the right way, rather than the ones which are grounded in pragmatism.

This is why I've learned to be suspicious of anyone with a job title of "architect". Some are amazingly good. But most that I've dealt with, are decidedly not. But when you hear them talk about it, they always sound like they are amazing.

It does sounds like forking is the right way to go in that case. Several successful product are forked and maintained after the original author lost interest without any involvement from them.

> If that is the attitude that you take towards everyone who contributes to your project, then you probably aren't a very good leader. That is, of course, your right.

Word "decide" was there deliberately. I am not fully opposed to consideration of suggestions made by others.

Though I may consider them and reject, like here.

And I will take opinions of contributors into much serious considerations than this blog post, for multiple reasons.

From position of maintainer in one of projects: primary risk to the project is main author running into too many annoying people and focusing on other hobbies.

And I in fact did it with one of projects. Some other maintainers also left. The same people who caused this by their entitlement are now complaining about project being stagnant.

> Or does it come from the willingness of the people working on that project to listen to you? That is "consent of the governed".

Major difference is that for countries if someone does not consent to decisions of ruler/parliament/etc. they have little to no recourse.

It ranges from extremely hard to impossible to change law or national policies or migrate to another country.

In comparison the worst case of forking open source project is much easier.

Control of open source project is much weaker and people forced to contribute are fairly unusual and rare (though in such cases I would consider my responses to blog post to be not applying, my comments were more focused on hobby projects).

If someone does not want to participate they may easily stop. This does massively differ from countries.

> there is no model for replacing poor governance

Do you have any model to propose? Because most democratic models you would see for country governance (to which you drew parallels) rely on some key characteristics that don't apply to open source governance, making them not really transferable.

Sure there is... Forking and convincing a significant portion of users and contributors to move with you.

This happened with iojs... Which is where Node as an org today came from. It happened with xfree86 to xorg...

It also fails plenty... I'm the the, you are not entitled to someone else's work. Make your own, or if the license permits, create your own fork... And if you lack the technical ability, sucks to be you.

There is a model, it’s called forking the code.

> Rails is that that there is no model for replacing poor governance

poor, according to whom?

But if it is someone's project, why should they have to leave if governance doesn't go the way they wish? The point of open source is sharing your work so others can use it and edit it. They have done their part and they maintain it as they choose whether that suits who uses it or not. I create open source projects myself, because they are applications I need or want. They are open source licensed so feel free to use them as such but my original code will develop and evolve as I choose.

> I feel that part of the problem with WordPress and Rails is that that there is no model for replacing poor governance.

But Eugen Rochko was not replaced. He voluntarily stepped down from power because he was personally dissatisfied in the leadership role. Nobody was calling for his ouster. He could have continued as leader of Mastodon for many more years with nobody batting an eyelash. So again, Mastodon is a red herring.

>Wasn't the WP fight at its core about who gets to make money ... I'm not sure how moral posturing fits into this.

“If you have a case where the law is clearly on your side, but the facts and justice seem to be against you, urge upon the jury the vast importance of sustaining the law. On the other hand, if the law is against you, or doubtful, and the facts show that your case is founded in justice, insist that justice be done though the heavens fall. If both the law and the facts are dead against you, in that case, talk around it, and the worse it is, the harder you pound the table.”

As far as I know that is really the only example. And to clarify it is about a struggle between who controls Rubygems and Bundler, not Ruby itself. A key component to be sure but maybe not that relevant to this discussion when the ones running the infra hijacks the GitHub project. That was an inside coup.