Even if people are reading something into your post that you don't intend, they are reading it for good reason. Which is that your post sounds exactly like an attack on any technically competent person that runs an open source project.

This fits squarely into a pattern that open source people deal with all of the time. Namely that someone tries to gain control of a project by appeals to "community", while subtly insulting the people who actually did the work. The result is toxic politics that, if it is left to stand, drives away technically competent contributors. And which makes leading that project a misery.

If you don't want to come across this way, you absolutely need to get rid of rhetoric like the paragraph beginning with, "The last year has seen several BDFLs act like Mad Kings." Anyone who has encountered this antipattern will see exactly what that leads to. It is a rhetorical club that can be levied against any technically competent person who objects to something based on technical concerns. The self-proclaimed "community leader" doesn't need to address those technical concerns. They just need to imply the ad hominem. Suggest that the contributor is the would-be Mad King. There are a number of ways that this can end. All of them are bad.

Now I'm not saying that you are bringing up an unimportant issue. But you REALLY need to check your tone if you wish to convince the people that you are supposedly addressing.

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travisgriggs 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> Namely that someone tries to gain control of a project by appeals to "community", while subtly insulting the people who actually did the work.

Lately, I’ve taken to labelling these different behaviors with D words: Doers, Discussers, Deciders, etc.

It’s amazing to me how often people want to create a specialty for themselves, where the doing is relegated to the doers, but all the doing is dictated by others.

This happens in businesses, NGOs, communities, churches, just about everywhere.

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btilly 5 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	ecshafer 35 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> 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. Oof this hits hard. So true. My first job as a developer at a corporation was moving from paper forms to digitally signed forms. We worked really hard for a year integrating with vendor products, saved millions of dollars in work time and error reduction a month, recurring, forever. We even got a nice call out at a town hall from the CEO.... we thought until the name that was called who "brought it all together" was some person none of us on the team had ever met, was never in any meetings, never did any work. But they probably pitched the idea two years ago.