On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 05:06:01PM +0200, Martijn Dekkers wrote:
> >
> > I think of another side of the medal: how the just starting project. w/
> > a lot of work to be done ahead, is going to be protected in the future
> > -- to share not the fate of «Debian»?
> > [...]
> > But, at the first, what is planned to perform to protect «Devuan» from
> > the guys, that got hold of the fantastic project «Debian»? In other
> > words, if the guys come to «Devuan» and by their cruelty will start
> > to «help» some of developers to corrupt the project, do abnormal,
> > unnatural for the project things -- similar like constitution of
> > «Debian» appeared, finnaly the «systemd» was forcibly set up: how we
> > will protect our project?
> >
>
> At the moment, Devuan runs under the "benevolent dictator" model, which
> counter-intuitively works quite well in many ways - not just for Free
> Software projects. I believe that a lot of the issues we see in Free
> Software Projects are in a large part due to the introduction of
> "democracy" into these efforts. A single (or very small group, i.e. VUA)
> determined "dictator" that provably has the best interests of the project
> and its community at heart is a lot better over a "democracy" type model,
> which - anyway you look at it - comes down to "mob rule". The wish of the
> majority isn't always what is best for the project - see Debian. When this
> dictatorship is combined with some form of meritocracy you have a model
> that has, over the past 30 years or so, proven itself to be highly robust
> in the face of adversity.
>
> Of course, it all comes down to the technical and political skills of the
> dictator. If the dictator behaves himself like an idiot, the project isn't
> going to get very far, but it is a lot more likely that a "democracy"
> behaves a lot more like an idiot, and much earlier in the lifecycle of the
> project. I have rarely seen democratic processes work well in FLOSS
> projects - for every success there are an overwhelming amount of failures.
>
> I, for one, welcome our VUA overlords!

Combining technically competent dictatorship with easy forkability, i.e.
the ability to emigrate, might even succeed.

-- hendrik