Free Software is a democracy, Mark Shuttleworth!

Democracy is majority rule. The minority has the decision of the majority forced upon them.

F/OSS does not use force. There is no mechanism of coercion.

So no, F/OSS is not a democracy. It is, actually, a Free Market.

Yes and no Bob, it's free market in that if you dont like what one distro is doing and can not change it (read BDFL has decreed 'It shall be thus') you can change to one that is doing what you want, and in that it is free market pressure. Inside individual distro's though is a different story, most of them, regardless of if they have some sort of council or not, typically have someone with dictatorial powers. Mark Shuttleworth, Daniel Robbins, Fabio Erculiani, Patrick Volkerding, Klaus Knopper, etc etc.

So inside the distro's you find a BDFL (benevolent dictator for life), outside the distros you find a developer meritocracy. So you only really have free market pressure in that you can select your dictator of preference. With luck you find one that is doing things the way you prefer.

> Inside individual distro's though is a different story, most of them, regardless of if they have some sort of council or not, typically have someone with dictatorial powers.

As it is in every firm or organization.

It is not intra-organization that defines a free market, but extra-organization.

> So you only really have free market pressure in that you can select your dictator of preference. With luck you find one that is doing things the way you prefer.

Yep, the free market in action. All the way from the monster called Debian, to Linux From Scratch, which is written by someone else too.

Quoting:Democracy is majority rule.

No. Majority rule is mob rule. Democracy is that we appoint a couple of smart people to make the decisions for us.

@Sander_Marechal If only the mob were smart enough to vote for the smart people ;-)

> Democracy is that we appoint a couple of smart people to make the decisions for us.

Traditionally, that's been a republic, and a democracy was exactly what Bob said, but the terms have gotten so jumbled over the years that you can pretty much use any of them interchangeably now.

I thought democracy means 'rule by the people'.

However, it's how you let the people rule.

You can have 'people put their money on the bank, bank invests it (buys) in shares, shares buy companies, companies buy politicians and politicians buy laws. Still an indirect democracy, I'd say - because after all the money is ours. But it's not transparent enough, eventually the ones who own the money should steer the companies to steer politics, and that doesn't happen. Money in retirement funds is invested without me as the 'owner' of that money having to say anything about how it's invested, and I cannot join shareholders meetings just because my money is in the retirement fund.

> Democracy is that we appoint a couple of smart people to make the decisions for us.

That's representation, into a "democratic" body where, again, majority rules.

It's nice in theory, but it creates a "target of opportunity" where the corruption of a handful of individuals can leverage huge quantities of power. Sort of a human bot-net.

Then there's the moral hazard of "Public Choice".

All built on top of the myth that it is possible to "represent" anyone other than one's self anyway, much less the thousands-to-millions that such "representatives" claim to represent.

Anyway, it's all arbitrary. All the different power structures have their positives and negatives, their benefits and weaknesses. There is no "best" because they are all fundamentally arbitrary.

When Debian "democracy" starts bombing the users of BSD "Theo-cracy", we'll know that real politics has finally infested F/OSS.

Quoting:When Debian "democracy" starts bombing the users of BSD "Theo-cracy"

The OpenBSD users will just hack into a Debian server that still runs the borked OpenSSL, and call off the attack.