zlacker

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

>>metaba+jN1
kind of, yeah, but dave's description of it as a gift exchange seems really on point. it's not a community in the way a village debating who should get to graze on the common is a community. it's a community in the sense that everyone has the right to use the shared resources, but that doesn't give them a vote

it's a curious situation, because with naturally scarce goods like grazing land, the best we can do is control access to them fairly, so our intuitions about community come from two million years of that. but software is knowledge, not land or capital goods. it conflicts with our intuitions

would you speak of the community of air-breathers, the community of users of the pythagorean theorem, the community of speakers of english? that's the kind of community we're talking about when we talk about the linux community or the rails community

>>kragen+KO1
You don't even get to vote with the code at times, and sometimes you don't tet to vote with money. And projects that get the money vote too hard and often end up in Mozilla situation, starving development of important or useful things for marketing features.

You can, however, vote with a fork, but then you end up in the "you forked it you maintain it" situation and big enough projects are too big for even a small team to properly maintain. Case in point: the perennial ffmpeg fork.

>>Astral+8S1
right, you can show up and do the work and then regret it