I've run a number of open source projects over the years.
Let me tell you how I organized stuff with the other contributors: I didn't. There were no other contributors. My projects weren't popular, and it's possible I'm the only one who used them.
There are a lot of people who have created projects like mine. And if we're being honest, part of the reason is I'm not very talented as a developer and my project didn't really scratch an itch people had, and I didn't put much work into advertising them.
So if someone else was more talented, produced a project people liked, and put the work into building their audience, why wouldn't that person whose talent, judgement, and hard work created the thing get to choose how the project is run? It's a sort of entitlement thinking that I should have a say in how something I couldn't create and didn't create should be run -- I had an equal chance to anyone else to create something cool and I blew it.
That isn't to say that every open source project shall or should be run like a dictatorship. Rather, it's to say that people who want to swoop in and implement "democratic control" of something after the fact are being unreasonable.
Let me tell you how I organized stuff with the other contributors: I didn't. There were no other contributors. My projects weren't popular, and it's possible I'm the only one who used them.
There are a lot of people who have created projects like mine. And if we're being honest, part of the reason is I'm not very talented as a developer and my project didn't really scratch an itch people had, and I didn't put much work into advertising them.
So if someone else was more talented, produced a project people liked, and put the work into building their audience, why wouldn't that person whose talent, judgement, and hard work created the thing get to choose how the project is run? It's a sort of entitlement thinking that I should have a say in how something I couldn't create and didn't create should be run -- I had an equal chance to anyone else to create something cool and I blew it.
That isn't to say that every open source project shall or should be run like a dictatorship. Rather, it's to say that people who want to swoop in and implement "democratic control" of something after the fact are being unreasonable.
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@sj_zero This has happened to me a few times. I was annoyed by the way various things were done so I built my own that worked the way I wanted it to. Then could not get other people to use it even though it was IMHO obviously better.
One problem we have is developers just do not think like other computer users.