zlacker

I agree with a lot of what the author is saying, but the premise seems a little odd to me. When did anyone ever claim open source was a democracy? And I don't really associate "community" with "democracy", either. I don't see them as related at all. Certainly there are communities in democracies, but there are communities under all kinds of political and governance systems.

I do think a lot of people have an entitled attitude toward open source and open source developers, which is regrettable (as someone who has been on the receiving end of that entitlement many times over the years), but I don't think I've really seen people assuming that users get to vote on what developers work on.

(I do recall bug trackers like Bugzilla used to have a feature where users could vote on bugs, though, so maybe in the past some people really did think that all open source developers would tackle the highest-voted issues first.)

Anyway, I do feel like this sort of post is par for the course for something DHH might write. I've never worked with him, but based on reading things he's written and observing (from a distance) some of his interactions with the Ruby community, he's always seemed a bit out of touch with how communities actually operate. To put it charitably.