Open Source Is Not a Democracy 641
itwbennett writes "A recent kerfuffle within the Ubuntu community serves as a reminder of an inconvenient truth: open source is not a democracy, writes blogger Brian Proffitt. 'The discussion started innocuously enough, within Bug #532633 in light-themes (Ubuntu) on Launchpad, where the order of the window controls within the Light theme were requested to be re-arranged to be on the upper right side of any given window. Light, it seemed, now placed the buttons on the left side, similar to the Mac OS X interface.' The discussion turned into an argument and culminated in this exchange in which Mark Shuttleworth lays down the law:
'It's fair comment that this was a big change, and landed without warning. There aren't any good reasons for that, but it's also true that no amount of warning would produce consensus about a decision like this... No. This is not a democracy. Good feedback, good data, are welcome. But we are not voting on design decisions.'"
Re:Any software project that is a Democracy (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Get Canonicall OUT of Debian environment (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Ubuntu is a club (Score:3, Funny)
Is it a wood or an iron?
Re:-1 Troll (Score:3, Funny)
Be careful, you strayed dangerously near the topic while bashing Microsoft. Can't have that, wouldn't be very Slashdot.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe Lenin thought dictatorship was the first step on the road to a worker's paradise, but he doesn't speak for everyone, especially not today.
Modern communists have the perspective to see how the Bolsheviks (among other groups) failed themselves and would rather not repeat their mistakes.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:5, Funny)
"But... but... it has electrolytes!" "Yeah, do you even know what electrolytes are exactly?" "It's what plants crave!"
Re:-1 Troll (Score:3, Funny)
Re:-1 Troll (Score:4, Funny)
Actually, didn't those ideas at least go back to Marx? Though, I always read the communist manifesto as less "this is how to bring about a workers paradise" or "we should fight the class war" as much as "This is the progression that I see happening" or "this is the war thats been going on for generations".
Also I will point out, as you may know, there are a number of communist communities, even here in the US, that have been operating, quietly, for generations, and living just fine in their communities. Look at "the farm" down in TN for some great examples of how more modern/progressive communists organize.
Its far less oppressive than you might think. They have organized around a system where people just...have normal every day paying jobs. They all pay into a common fund, get an allowance to live off of, and even get a pension from their community. They seem to live (according to articles that I have read) more like a large communal tribe than a town or city of disconnected individuals.
-Steve
Re:-1 Troll (Score:3, Funny)
The brilliance behind FOSS is that anarchy and totalitarianism can actually strike a balance that feels a lot like democracy:
Perhaps there should be a name for such a system - I nominate forkocracy.
Neo said there is no spoon, but there definitely is a fork.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:3, Funny)
If it really is that simple (which could be put into a desktop shortcut) and it's causing hours upon hours of flame war, I now have a new respect for discussing the differences between emacs and vi.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:3, Funny)
Anarchy is undemocratic, because for practical purposes, in an anarchic state, the strong rule the weak
No one rules anyone under Anarchy, by definition. ("an archos"). What you really mean to say here is that what most people call Anarchy is not, and would be better described as Warlordism.