> As one of them I want to state that others, including you, are not entitled to decide how I run my project.

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.

But if you were interested in the long term survival of your project and attracting other developers to contribute, then it behooves you to consider the desires and needs of the community of contributors.

> But I utterly reject that open source project is substantially similar to governing a country in responsibility and preferred setup.

"Consent of the governed" is about countries, it is about leadership and where the privilege of leadership comes from. If you are leading a software project, does your authority come from god? Or does it come from the willingness of the people working on that project to listen to you? That is "consent of the governed".

> 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.