Why should the decisionmaking process for Chromium be “democratic” simply because it is open source?
Anyone who wants to pay can implement whatever they want in the codebase. That’s in a way as democratic as it gets: equality of opportunity [to invest money and time].
If Google is paying for the implementors’ time, Google should have 100% say in what code they write. You and everyone else are free (thanks to Google’s generosity) to fork it at any point in the commit history and individually veto any specific change.
> Anyone who wants to pay can implement whatever they want in the codebase. That’s in a way as democratic as it gets: equality of opportunity [to invest money and time].
Leaving aside whether that's how it should work, I'm not sure if that's in fact how it works for Chromium today. If I write a high-quality patch adding support for trailers, will it get accepted? As I understand it, the answer is no. (But I would be happy to be wrong.)
So that's my main point: it would be good to have a democratic decision making process, not for what code Googlers should write, but for what patches would get accepted into Chromium. Not just because it's open source, but also because it's the basis not just of Google's browser, but a bunch of other browsers as well.
(And note that https://www.chromium.org/ seemingly aims to give the project an air of independence from Google. Thus, I'm merely questioning whether it is, in fact, independent, and arguing that it should be, if it isn't.)
The democratic process is that anyone who wants to pay for the ad campaign can try to convince everyone else that it's a good spec everyone should adopt, not merely pay a developer to code it.
If everyone else is not convinced then it should not become a thing no matter how much one party with money wants it.
Anyone who wants to pay can implement whatever they want in the codebase. That’s in a way as democratic as it gets: equality of opportunity [to invest money and time].
If Google is paying for the implementors’ time, Google should have 100% say in what code they write. You and everyone else are free (thanks to Google’s generosity) to fork it at any point in the commit history and individually veto any specific change.