zlacker

>>levlaz+(OP)
It’s not a democracy, but it’s a community. The act of sharing creates a community.

>>metaba+jN1
That is not true in most people’s experience judging from previous HN threads unfortunately.

Generally one or two contributors are breaking their balls doing all the work and due to a schooling created desire to inpress others are just being taken advantage of.

Then thousands of freeloaders and cheerleaders riding on their back who are not even willing to donate $2 to the project demand more and more shit

Eventually the contributors eventually burning out and seeing how stupid the entire thing is (I.e no longer caring what these people say or think of the project) and the project suddenly gets abandoned

Two dudes creating something from a place of ego satisfaction and thousands of cheerleaders taking advantage of them is not a community

>>atlasy+4O1
Unless said two guys (usually the core is up to 10) are implementing the project to work well for their own uses too.

Really, FOSS exists to solve problems of the developers, with good user interface sometimes an afterthought for this particular reason, as the developer is the ultimate power user often enough.

The exceptions are the true big projects, but they can end up in the 10 people situation due to sheer size of it. Those people are then usually maintainers, like in Linux. Unless the project starves due to user/developer mismatch, or gets taken over by corporate interest and people start implementing stuff neither the developers nor users actually want, sapping the energy. (I'm looking here at Mozilla Foundation specifically.)