I do not need consent as I am not governing anyone like king or president governs.

If someone is using my project they are also not really entitled to anything, beyond what stated in license and similar documents if any.

If they dislike it, they can fork my project and go away.

If someone wants to be entitled to anything, they are free to make a contract and pay for service they desire. But while many are happy to demand nearly noone is willing to help. Or even fork project. Instead they make entitled demand and treat open source developers as servants or slaves or their pets.

No, you are not entitled to your preferred governance model to be used in my software project.

Unlike with a government, you can easily walk a way from a software project or create a fork. There is almost zero friction to "voting with your feet" in software and it works.

I think we should hold our breath for a moment. The wars waged over concession don't always happen immediately, and not always involving the expected parties [1].

> Today, we’re marking another momentous step in this ongoing process as our Founder and now former CEO Eugen Rochko begins his transition into a new role with Mastodon. We are thrilled that he will continue on in an advisory role with our team.

The problem with the undead King is if they ever feel the need to exercise any form of power.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Hastings

TinyETL - Fast, zero-config ETL in a single binary https://github.com/alrpal/TinyETL

The transition from being the sole architect of “my” project into more of a maintainer, organizer, director, has been a unique experience and interesting to reflect on.

What’s the future hold? I really don’t know.

It was difficult.

I could have easily considered it "mine, all mine!". When I first started handing it over to the team that now runs it, I considered being a BDFL, but found out that I couldn't let go, while still in the mix.

So I walked away from it. I still chip in a peanut gallery comment on Slack, every now and then, but otherwise, I'm history.

Best decision I ever made. The new team took it to the next level.

  * Gihub organization is co-owned (2 Owners)
  * I own the domain, they run the Discord server
  * Finances are handled by https://opencollective.com/
  * All code is GPL or AGPL licensed

If anyone is interested https://go-micro.dev

For example, Linux kernel is definitely widely used and I'd argue that it is one of the few things that have achieved globally acknowledgement and usage, i.e. a "human" thing, as the aliens said. Such a project would naturally require some strong leader (Linus is famous for being straightforward and none-BS) and a bunch of able enforcers (maintainers). I don't think we are short of able enforcers, although the total number of Linux maintainers who understand the full picture may be small, but we don't need a lot of them anyway. The key is to elect an equally good and strong leader, without which the project may degrade slowly, like all human projects. I'd hope someone with both the technical knowledge as well a strong character to take over whence Linus retires -- but Linus is only 55 years old so I believe he and the community still have many years to search for the next leader.

It's clear there is a lot of drama in Opensource projects lately, but there are countless projects where the maintainer would be thrilled to have one or two people that would actually want to invest their time into reviewing some code with him. Day they find others pumped by their work and willing to invest some time would be celebrated with cake each year.

Just because someone else's broken CI pipeline does "Several thousands of downloads of NPM package per day" should not make you feel bad that you have not "Build an organisation which won't crumble" yet.

That's backwards. You want to help those people? Create that organization. Create another Apache org and take over important projects that need that.

It really feels like banging the wrong drum. Just another person having a broken curl setup and blaming Daniel Stenberg for it.

This is the true benefit of democracy that it actually delivers.

Most stated benefits of democracy are partially true, but with a solid remainder supplied via the rose colored lenses of denial and hope. There is much work that remains to be done.

Or gets convicted of the first-degree murder of his wife.

that is an interesting point I didn't realize.

When you become part of the community, contribute to it, gain share in building the common thing then you might gain some claim to participation in the governance. Or maybe not. And the beauty of OSS is that if you don't like that, you are free to fork it and establish your own community literally at any time. Yes, you'd be facing an uphill struggle to convince people your community is better and they should move over. That's exactly how it should be. If it's indeed better, they will come. If it's just your ego and delusion speaking, they will not.

I don't have enough interest in Mastodon project to have an opinion about what happened there, but presenting it like every project founder owes to turn it over to the Committee of Concerned Citizens is nonsense. And, also, the description of "There are no VCs bringing in their MBA-brained lackeys to extract maximum value while leaving a rotting husk." may yet prove very false, as the project grows. Github was once a young, scrappy and full of inconvential management ideas, now it's literally Microsoft. Let Mastodon be governed by committee for 10 years and we'll see.

Might sound a bit evil at first but it is the way to bolster the whole xkcd issue.

I think it's crucial to point out, though, that Eugen Rochko's motives for stepping down were explicitly personal. He's still quite young, Mastodon itself is still quite young, less than a decade old, and Rochko could have continued in his position for some time. He stepped down because he wanted to step down, not for some selfless reason like succession planning. And I'm not criticizing Rochko for that; he can live his life the way he chooses and do what makes him happy, avoid what he finds unpleasant. And he's to be commended for the mentioned peaceful transition of power. However, there's no inherent reason why Matt Mullenweg or DHH should step down just because Rochko stepped down; their personal goals are obviously different. And Rochko behaved very differently while he was still leading Mastodon.

The author clearly wants those other leaders to step down because he doesn't like those leaders and how they behave, not because of some abstract idea of succession planning. I don't think the metaphor of a king's death is apt here, because nobody has died or become incapacitated. They've just become overtly contemptible.