

Open Source is Not a Democracy - ilamont
http://www.itworld.com/open-source/101641/open-source-not-democracy

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hexis
It has always seemed to me that open source was fundamentally non-democratic.
An open source license does not protect your ability to influence decision
making in a project, it protects your ability to fork a project.

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avar
That's an incomplete analogy. Specific Open Source projects aren't democracies
Open Source at large is, or something resembling it.

I installed Ubuntu 10.04 beta1 and didn't like the button arrangement. It was
trivial to fix it by just doing: sudo add-apt-repository
ppa:stownsend42/light-themes

If enough people don't like the default setup of Ubuntu someone will just fork
it. In fact there are already three forks that I know of: Kubuntu, Xubuntu and
Edubuntu.

~~~
fader
Just FYI, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and Edubuntu are not really forks -- they're
official 'flavours' of Ubuntu supported by Canonical. (As are Ubuntu Netbook
Edition, Ubuntu Studio, and Ubuntu Server.)

Linux Mint is probably closer to a fork of Ubuntu -- they take the Ubuntu
distribution, make some changes and additions, and re-release it.

~~~
avar
I was actually aware of that. I've just been inspired by GitHub to use the
word "fork" in a more inclusive manner.

Anyway, it really doesn't really matter who maintains the the fork. The
important part is that with Open Source anyone can create one.

If your fork is better it'll become the canonical version. Just look at what
happened with XFree86 and X.Org.

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njharman
Neither are oranges.

Both statements carry the same value, insight, and understanding.

