No. Open source should be more like Darwinism. If you want to make a change, you fork the code. If the creator(s) likes your changes, they incorporate it. If a code base is good, it survives, if it isn't it dies.<p>The key point is freedom - your freedom to do whatever you like with the code, and the creators freedom to do what they like.
I think democracy is almost the worst way to take decisions when it comes to scientific/engineering things. In an open source project, a single expert should be able to overrule the mass of users/contributors if his point is technically more correct. This is very difficult to consistently achieve in a democracy.<p>I would love to see the results/conclusion of this research. We would finally get some data-backed insight into why/why not democracy is good for a software project.
<i>In fact, the one that says how decisions are taken follows a Benevolent Dictator for life model. Cleary, not something we would accept in any other community aspect of our society.</i><p>There are a handful of counter examples floating through my head. The BDFL model can be described generically as willing collaboration among peers where one ultimately has the power to control the project. The strongest example that comes to mind is bands. A band can have a very similar model, they - like open source - can also have a project structure nothing like a BDFL.<p><i>Cleary, not something we would accept in any other community aspect of our society.</i><p>This is also kinda funny to me because if we make a theoretical BDFL more controlling than we expect from an average Open Source BDFL, we accept this model for collaboration _all the time_. It's called "management." What's not funny is that this is the premise is treated as axiomatic by the researcher.
Imagine a building whose design and construction was governed by democracy. The architecture would be a horrible mish-mash of whatever happened to be popular, and likely architecturally unsound and unsafe. The actual construction would be a nightmare too, since someone would have the "brilliant" idea of painting drywall before laying it so people don't have to use unsafe ladders, ect.<p>Software can be millions of times more complicated than building blueprints. Why in the hell do you think democracy will work for software when it doesn't work for office buildings?<p>Contrast this with the way open source development generally proceeds. A single developer (or maybe a few) create a software project as the core team. They are the experts for that project. Other people can make suggestions and contribute, but it's up to the core team to decide if something meshes with the vision they have for the project.<p>What if someone disagrees? They can simply fork the project and try out their own vision. They are the expert of their own project.<p>This has some amazing consequences. First of all there can be <i>multiple</i> winners. Project A can be very popular, yet project B, which caters to a minority, can also exist and serve people with different needs and tastes. Second, it allows parallel experiments of multiple ideas, which encourages rapid innovation to take place. Finally, it helps minimize conflict between people, since you can join or start a project that meets your fancy without penalty.<p>Contrast this with democracy. In a democracy it's winner take all. Majority vote determines what everyone has to live with. This creates conflict and intense competition (including bribes and corruption) to get majority vote. It slows innovation because things can only be done one way at a time, whichever way was popular. There can be no single vision, everything becomes a huge contorted mess. It's hard enough to architect software with a single vision.<p>You should be doing research on how to make politics more like the (multi)governance of open source development, not the other way around!
We're researchers trying to get funding to study how existing knowledge in political science, social science and economy can be adapted to improve open source software development. We need the input of OSS developers !
It sounds vaguely interesting what existing knowledge there is on people working for free for a common cause out of their own volition, and where democracy comes into play.<p>"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch"
I find myself harumphing at much of the proposal. It's not the topic itself; democracy can work in open source, and I think Debian is well served by that model. There are interesting things to be researched about open source project management, but the approach doesn't seem to face them head on, and is full of assumptions that could be detrimental to the usefulness or quality of findings.<p>I'd have to really dig into the proposal but I don't even have time to fully absorb that blog post. I'll try to expand on this after work if I still give half a damn.