FBXL Social

Having participated in and run a number of OSS projects, it's self-evident that the people who did the work of writing the original program and popularizing it get the power to steer the project. For most projects there *is* nobody else. For a lot of projects there aren't even users or financial backers or even other developers. It isn't until much further down the line that there's even anyone else in the room to ask about governance. By the time there is someone else to ask about things, the Hot shot developer who actually did all the work is firmly in charge because they've done all the work, they've made all the decisions, and that work and those decisions ended up being successful.

With FOSS anyone is free to fork the project and run it differently, but that isn't really what most people want to do. It's a lot of work, and it's fairly thankless work.