zlacker

It’s not a democracy, but it’s a community. The act of sharing creates a community.

>>metaba+(OP)
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

>>metaba+(OP)
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

>>atlasy+L
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.)

>>kragen+r1
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+P4
right, you can show up and do the work and then regret it