Hi Ibsen, Ibsen S Ripsbusker wrote on Sun, Jul 21, 2019 at 05:51:21PM +0000:
> benevolent dictatorship I'm aware you did not call OpenBSD a "benevolent dictatorship", and i totally see how the term can be used both to shut down or to incite controversy. Yet, i heard the term used several times in the past in relation to OpenBSD, and merely wanted to mention that i think is misses the point. Words of the "...cracy" field can be used for systems of making, adjudicating, and executing laws, laws that limit or expand what people can and cannot have or do, that directly impact people's lives. Nothing of the kind is at stake here or at the very most, the right of using the name "OpenBSD". OpenBSD cannot make any laws that bind me or cannot tell me what to do or what not to do, not even in programming, so the question what kind of a "...cracy" it is is already a moot question to ask. I'm 100% free to walk away at any time if i'm unhappy with the colour of the servers in Theo's basement and publish my software elsewhere. That isn't just a theoretical possibility, it's quite easy in practice if needed; in fact, mandoc.bsd.lv is already up and running, and so is bsd.plumbing and other similar places - not because developers are unhappy with Theo providing free servers in his basement and fostering a very fertile development community around them, but simply because having your own site and name with global visibility is not such a big deal in this day and age. Also, walking away does not necessarily even uproot you from a development community - i doubt that people like bapt@ at FreeBSD or wiz@ at NetBSD or stapelberg@ at Debian or Leah at Void greatly care whether or not i contribute to OpenBSD this week. So, yes, OpenBSD developers form a social group, but not in a way that (formally or effectively) assigns rights or duties or opportunities such that describing it as a "...cracy" would make much sense. People walking away and doing their work elsewhere under a new name happens all the time for very diverse reasons and often enough for good reasons: pf(4), OpenSSH, LibreSSL, heck, OpenBSD itself, and even NetBSD before that... When it happens, the parent projects sometimes fade into oblivion - consider pf(4), OpenSSH - and sometimes live on - consider (so far) the parents of LibreSSL and of OpenBSD itself as examples. See, if you dislike the way Andorran politics is currently being run, you cannot simply renounce citizenship and set up your own state in some corner of the country. So in some contexts, asking about "...cracy" is indeed highly meaningful. For a completely free software project, no so much. Even in a commercial enterprise, the question of governance is more relevant than in OpenBSD - while in most countries, employees are formally free to quit, for some employees, that may be a somewhat theoretical option because some may have few practical chances to make their living in some other way. And besides, employers *do* almost invariably tell employees what to work on and how, which isn't the case here either. Yours, Ingo
