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:-1 Troll (Score:5, Informative)
May be short summary of what you've said:
When one says: "this is not democracy" or "this is supposed to be a democracy" he has to specify the scope of the statement.
Free market system is democratic in a sense that everybody can vote with their dollars between products, but individual companies are not democratic.
Open source is democratic: one can join different trees or start your own copy, but individual trees (flavors of the project) are not democratic.
But.... it's open.... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:-1 Troll (Score:5, Informative)
Thats anarchy, not democracy.
Look 'em up.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:5, Informative)
You're free to fix it.
Set up a site, fork the source and run your site as a true democracy.
Every decision can be put to a vote.
When setting it up you can even make sure you're no more equal than anyone else.
Open Source is not Ubuntu (Score:5, Informative)
Okay, Ubuntu is popular. I get it. But it is not the totality of open source. Neither is Linux, for that matter. This example is specifically about Ubuntu, not about open source. Ubuntu is a dictatorship obeying the golden rule; Shuttlewood has the gold so he makes the rules. If you don't like it, fork it or use something different.
Most open source projects are democracies, although not all votes are equal. Their constituents are people who who contribute something to the project, and the greater the contribution the more say they have in the direction of the project. Contributions come in the form of code, documentation, artwork, bug reports, and money. If you've never contributed any of these things to a project, then you don't get a vote.
If you have, you get some say, although the person who wrote 90% of the code gets a lot more say than someone who only filed one bug report. People contribute to open source projects because they expect to get something back. In my experience, most developers will put some extra effort into feature requests from people who have contributed something that they consider valuable.
Ubuntu isn't actually unusual in this respect at all. Shuttlewood contributes the developers' salaries, and they give priority to his feature requests.
Re:Compare to the US Democratic Process (Score:2, Informative)
The US is a republic, not a democracy.
The difference may be something glossed over in schools in the US, but the different was *important* to the people who created the US's system of government.
Re:People complaining..... (Score:5, Informative)
He did. He said it's welcome.
That still does not mean Canonical will do what the complainers want.
Re:Why left? (Score:5, Informative)
Full quote (Score:5, Informative)
As it often happens the summary is rather sensationalist, as I would not dare accuse anyone of actually RTFA, here's Shuttleworth's full response (with which I could not agree more):
Mark Shuttleworth wrote on 2010-03-17: Re: [Bug 532633] Re: [light-theme] please revert the order of the window controls back to "menu:minimize, maximize, close" #167
On 15/03/10 23:42, Pablo Quirós wrote:
> It'd have been nice if this comment had been made some time ago,
> together with a deep reasoning on the concrete changes that are in mind.
>
> We are supposed to be a community, we all use Ubuntu and contribute to
> it, and we deserve some respect regarding these kind of decisions. We
> all make Ubuntu together, or is it a big lie?
We all make Ubuntu, but we do not all make all of it. In other words, we
delegate well. We have a kernel team, and they make kernel decisions.
You don't get to make kernel decisions unless you're in that kernel
team. You can file bugs and comment, and engage, but you don't get to
second-guess their decisions. We have a security team. They get to make
decisions about security. You don't get to see a lot of what they see
unless you're on that team. We have processes to help make sure we're
doing a good job of delegation, but being an open community is not the
same as saying everybody has a say in everything.
This is a difference between Ubuntu and several other community
distributions. It may feel less democratic, but it's more meritocratic,
and most importantly it means (a) we should have the best people making
any given decision, and (b) it's worth investing your time to become the
best person to make certain decisions, because you should have that
competence recognised and rewarded with the freedom to make hard
decisions and not get second-guessed all the time.
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.
> If you want to tell us
> that we are all part of it, we want information, and we want our opinion
> to be decisive.
>
No. This is not a democracy. Good feedback, good data, are welcome. But
we are not voting on design decisions.
Mark
No recompile needed (Score:5, Informative)
It's easy to change even within the current distribution. Steps to fix:
* Start gconf-editor
* expand in this order: apps, metacity, general
* Find entry "button_layout"
* change it to "menu:minimize,maximize,close"
The colon separates left side and right side.
Re:Why left? (Score:4, Informative)
Mark Shuttleworth wants to de-clutter the right so as to add nifty new stuff on the right in the future [webupd8.org].
In a democracy members submit ... (Score:3, Informative)
Open source is utterly a democracy. Each of us may have our own source tree. If we can convince others to come join us in it
That is a description of anarchy, not democracy. In a democracy the minority members submit to the will of the majority. They limit voicing their disagreement to persuasive dialog, they don't storm off in a hissy fit.
Re:Compare to the US Democratic Process (Score:1, Informative)
> The US is a republic, not a democracy.
It's a democratic republic, a form of democracy. Just because we elect representatives instead of holding plebiscites does not make it not a democracy.
Reciting some phrase you were told in grade school civics without further qualification does not make you smart or even look smart.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ [linuxfromscratch.org]
For those who feel a need to have complete control over their own desktops.
I see the arguments each direction on this one - and my own view is 'whatever happened to letting the users decide themselves?'
I have spent ages playing with themes on KDE, Gnome, WindowMaker and Enlightenment. If you're not able to customize, just run OSX or Windows and get an OS that someone controls and will actually provide real support for (including paying off vendors to write drivers).
Linux is supposed to be about the anarchy of self-expression and total control of your machine. Canonical, RedHat, SuSE and many others provide varying levels of 'corporate stability' that you can buy into if you're into that sort of thing.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:4, Informative)
Any country is a republic... (Score:4, Informative)
Except those with monarchs. Even North Korea is a republic even though the Kim dynasty basically is a royal line. Being a republic and being a democracy are orthogonal. The UK is a good example of a monarchy that is also a democracy, just like the US is a republic that is also a democracy, and North Korea is a republic that is also a dictatorship. Yes, neither the US nor the UK are *direct* democracies like in ancient Athens.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:3, Informative)
Why should systems of government at large be applied to software projects?
Open Source is neither democratic or communist, because Open Source is not a government.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:5, Informative)
Anarchy is direct democracy. I looked it up.
Well, you looked it up wrong. One of the pillars of anarchy is that man should not have power over man, whereas democracy is based on the idea that the majority should have the power to impose its will over the rest of the population. The only case when anarchy and direct democracy match is when you have a 100% agreement on everything.
Re:Full quote (Score:4, Informative)
I'm pretty sure he's referring to software vulnerabilities being disclosed to the security team. As an outsider, you don't get to see those until they're fixed (or made public by somebody else).
Re:Why left? (Score:4, Informative)
While I agree that "Because the Mac does it that way" is not a good reason, Apple spent about $50 million in research (according to Bruce Tognazzini [asktog.com]) to study some of these sorts of things. So one can probably assume that Apple actually might have a good reason.
Why do you assume mouse side on the right determines that putting scroll bars on the right is the most effecient thing to do?
There's a little thing called Fitts' Law [wikipedia.org] which has two elements:
From this, assuming that the mouse is on the right hand side of the screen, accessing a same-sized scrollbar would be quicker if it is on the right than if it were on the left. A scrollbar could be placed on the left, but it would have to be larger in order to be as efficient as one on the right which would mean less space for data.
It is also good for scrollbars to be in a consistent place (either left or right) for motor-memory and that fact that if you have multiple scrollbars, it will be confusing as to which controls what.
That said, since most mice sold nowadays have a scroll-wheel, perhaps it's time to rethink the need for scrollbars in the first place.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:3, Informative)
We just got much closer to a Communist Democracy today in fact.
Hope you're all out there shopping for your now GOVERNMENT MANDATED health insurance - that or you can pay 2% of your annual income as a penalty.
Land of the Free indeed - land of the free lunch
Do you even know what communism is? Obama's health care isn't it, nor does it even come close to it. It is probably even the direct opposite of it, since it is mandating people to give money to insurance companies, meaning it is corporatist (or fascist), not communist. If we got the public option (or better, lined the insurance companies up against the wall, and ONLY had public health care) then we're coming closer to socialism, which, again, isn't communism.
Get off the "communism is bad, therefore everything I don't like is communism" vibe. It doesn't make you sound smart.