[HN Gopher] The peaceful transfer of power in open source projects
___________________________________________________________________
The peaceful transfer of power in open source projects
Author : edent
Score : 181 points
Date : 2025-11-19 13:20 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (shkspr.mobi)
(TXT) w3m dump (shkspr.mobi)
| JimDabell wrote:
| A long-standing succession plan also reduces the likelihood of a
| supply-chain attack. A fed-up maintainer deciding to quit is the
| worst possible time to pick a successor.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Considering the sustained harassment some targeted individuals
| endure, it is important FOSS keeps a healthy community around
| projects. =3
| lapcat wrote:
| I'm not sure there's much utility in this article. It feels like
| the point was mainly to dunk on Ruby on Rails and WordPress
| without mentioning them by name. And such dunking may be
| justified, but it's not particularly interesting and won't lead
| to an enlightening discussion.
|
| 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.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I don't take the same thing from the article. Yes, it's lighter
| than Terence's standard writing, and a bit more closed than his
| usual style, but I feel that he just wanted to underline
| something he liked personally.
|
| In once sentence, the blog post reads: Hey,
| look, this guy did something nice, and was honest about it.
|
| That's all.
| lapcat wrote:
| I wouldn't even call it "nice." Stepping down only 9 years
| after the introduction of Mastodon seems a bit premature. I
| wouldn't call it selfish, though some people might. Plus,
| Rochko did get paid 1 million euros in the transition.
|
| For all I know, Rails and WordPress already have succession
| plans, or if not, I'm sure they will eventually, as the
| founders get older. They're still relatively young.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > The author clearly wants those other leaders to step down
|
| I think you are putting words in their mouth. They could easily
| have explicitly called to those leaders to step down.
|
| > He stepped down because he wanted to step down, not for some
| selfless reason like succession planning.
|
| The praise of Rochko isn't for stepping down. The praise is for
| the way he setup sucession and governance as he did so.
|
| >> Simply, we are going to transfer ownership of key Mastodon
| ecosystem and platform components (including name and
| copyrights, among other assets) to a new non-profit
| organization, affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be
| owned or controlled by a single individual.
| lapcat wrote:
| > I think you are putting words in their mouth. They could
| easily have explicitly called to those leaders to step down.
|
| Let me quote from the article: "The last year has seen
| several BDFLs act like Mad Kings. They become tyrannical
| despots, lashing out at their own volunteers. They execute
| takeovers of community projects. They demand fealty and
| tithes. Like dragons, they become quick to anger when their
| brittle egos are tested. Spineless courtiers carry out
| deluded orders while pilfering the coffers."
|
| Also, from a comment by the article author: "I feel that part
| of the problem with WordPress and Rails is that that there is
| no model for replacing poor governance."
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45980607
|
| I don't think my interpretation is a stretch.
|
| > The praise of Rochko isn't for stepping down. The praise is
| for the way he setup sucession and governance as he did so.
|
| Was there a Mastodon succession plan _before_ Rochko
| unexpectedly stepped down? I 'm not aware of one. And how do
| you know that Rails and WordPress don't already have their
| own succession plans?
| shkkmo wrote:
| > I don't think my interpretation is a stretch.
|
| It isn't charitable and I don't think it adds to the
| discussion.
|
| > Also, from a comment by the article author: "I feel that
| part of the problem with WordPress and Rails is that that
| there is no model for replacing poor governance."
|
| He is explicitly calling out the lack of a governance
| replacement model, not calling out the failure to choose to
| step down by those leaders.
|
| > Was there a Mastodon succession plan before Rochko
| unexpectedly stepped down?
|
| No, but there should have been. What if he had been hit by
| a bus?
|
| Not having governance and plans for sucession means that
| the only option for change is "non-peaceful" which means
| that when people think a change is required there will be
| problems. I would argue that many of these problems in
| these projects is caused more by this than by the particlar
| bad leaders.
| lapcat wrote:
| > It isn't charitable
|
| I think it's accurate. What's inaccurate about it?
|
| Moreover, I think the article author _would_ call for
| those leaders to step down if he thought that would be
| effective. After all, he called them "Mad Kings" and
| "tyrannical despots." Do you think the author wants Mad
| Kings to remain in power??? But of course the Mad Kings
| have no desire to step down, which is why forcible
| replacement would be the only option.
|
| > He is explicitly calling out the lack of a governance
| replacement model
|
| There doesn't seem to be any evidence that Mastodon had a
| governance replacement model before Rochko chose to step
| down.
|
| > No, but there should have been. What if he had been hit
| by a bus?
|
| That's my point, though. Rochko _wanted_ to step down,
| which _forced_ Mastodon to come up with a succession
| plan. So I 'm not sure why praise is due for this.
|
| > Not having governance and plans for sucession means
| that the only option for change is "non-peaceful"
|
| You ignored my question, though: "how do you know that
| Rails and WordPress don't already have their own
| succession plans?"
| alphazard wrote:
| Comparing software projects to governments usually produces the
| wrong intuition. The stakes are much lower, and risk tolerance
| should be much higher with a software project. Dictators are
| good, forks are good, even conflict can be good because it means
| people care. On the contrary, democracy leads to mediocre
| decisions, designs by committee, and sluggishness.
|
| 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.
| antonvs wrote:
| > Unlike with a government, you can easily walk away
|
| Part of me hopes for a Snow Crash future where if you don't
| like the services provided by The American Mafia (a bit of on-
| the-nose prophecy from Neal Stephenson), you can switch to Mr.
| Lee's Greater Hong Kong instead. Sadly, human rights would
| likely be a casualty in that overall scenario.
| purple_turtle wrote:
| Open source software project captured by evil people in the
| worst case results in a lot of confusion and annoyance.
|
| Countries captured by evil people in the worst cases that
| result in millions of dead people.
|
| Entirely different risks are acceptable.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > There is almost zero friction
|
| Building consensus around which fork to use is going to be a
| high-friction process; it's going to require much more work
| than pushing the "fork" button and changing the name in all the
| assets.
| j-bos wrote:
| Then make something so much better it's worth it to use. This
| is code, code is purpose driven first and foremost.
| alphazard wrote:
| I don't think the consensus is really necessary. Right now we
| live in a world where version control and patch management is
| still pretty high cost. That leads to fewer active forks of
| each open source project.
|
| As the technology improves, I expect us to move to a world
| where each project is actually a cloud of forks. So instead
| of rebranding every time there's a fork of XYZ software, we
| just refer to the forks by the name of the maintainer. e.g. I
| use Chad McProgrammer's XYZ.
|
| It seems like some people want unity and sameness for its own
| sake, or to enforce their vision of a project on the users. I
| just want the software to work as close to my ideal as
| possible, and am willing to shop around maintainers to find
| the one that I personally consider the best. Why would you
| compromise if you don't have to?
| bArray wrote:
| > Which is why I am delighted that the Mastodon project has shown
| a better way to behave.
|
| 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
| smashah wrote:
| There should be P.E Firms run by OSS devs concentrating in being
| the succession and exit plan for OSS founders while charging big
| tech cos ($1bn+) for support.
|
| Might sound a bit evil at first but it is the way to bolster the
| whole xkcd issue.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Or we could shame companies into action by refusing to use and
| pay to companies who use FOSS (all of them) but don't
| contribute back (most of them). Lastly, don't contribute to
| their FOSS projects, regardless of how nice they might look, if
| they're not contributing to the ecosystem overall.
| jamesbelchamber wrote:
| And start putting flowers up our noses while we're at it!
| iddan wrote:
| Any concrete idea how to peruse this idea? I can't think of
| any realistic one
| szszrk wrote:
| I struggle to find out who is this aimed at, really.
|
| 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.
| gassi wrote:
| I run a semi-popular open source project (https://romm.app/), and
| this is a topic we tend to revisit regularly. While there will
| always have to be _someone_ at the top who owns the project, we
| 've tried to organize ourselves in a way that should prevent a
| complete hostile takeover: * 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
|
| In the event either (or both) of us step away, temporarily or
| permanently, the core team is has the power and permissions to
| continue running the project indefinitely. While I would be able
| to remove them as co-owner on Github in a takeover scenario, I
| won't have access to the finances or the Discord community.
| graemep wrote:
| > Name and branding are owned by The Project itself
|
| That is only meaningful if the project is a legal entity that
| can sue, otherwise it means "no one owns it" - which is fine if
| that is what you want.
| gassi wrote:
| > otherwise it means "no one owns it" - which is fine if that
| is what you want.
|
| Thanks for pointing this out, I removed that line to clarify.
| bodhi_mind wrote:
| The whole "why I contribute to open source" has been on my mind
| lately after I published my first open source project and it's
| gotten moderate attention from the data engineering community
| (200 GitHub stars):
|
| 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.
| hobs wrote:
| Wow, really impressive, there's a lot of stuff going on in such
| a small package, great work!
| bodhi_mind wrote:
| I appreciate the kind words!
| muragekibicho wrote:
| 'or if reading is too woke' Amazing piece and oddly relatable
| purple_turtle wrote:
| > I'm begging project leaders everywhere - please read up on the
| social contract and the consent of the governed.
|
| 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.
| edent wrote:
| I think you've read something into my post that I didn't
| intend.
|
| I'm specifically talking about the community of people who _do_
| contribute. If you look at the recent shenanigans of WordPress
| and Ruby, they are causing discontent _within_ the existing
| organisation of contributors.
|
| Those contributors are, of course, free to fork off if they
| want. But if you're trying to build a long-term viable project,
| then you need a way to ensure that the people working with you
| are treated fairly.
| purple_turtle wrote:
| Post explicitly makes request to all project leaders: "I'm
| begging project leaders everywhere".
|
| As one of them I want to state that others, including you,
| are not entitled to decide how I run my project. I want to
| express that I am thankful that this one is phrased as
| suggestion.
|
| But I utterly reject that open source project is
| substantially similar to governing a country in
| responsibility and preferred setup.
|
| So I reject your analogy and suggestions as highly flawed.
| glenstein wrote:
| I don't take it as a request that you open your process to
| granular shot calling or feature requests from from users.
| Ignore them all you want! But I would put
| transition/succession in a different category.
|
| Maybe in a sense requesting your project have its own life-
| after-death counts as "shot calling" from your perspective
| because it's still essentially about what "they" want
| rather than a sober reflection on your
| time/capacity/interest, but I think at least that it's
| different from ordinary feature requests.
| Aperocky wrote:
| It does sounds like forking is the right way to go in
| that case. Several successful product are forked and
| maintained after the original author lost interest
| without any involvement from them.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > As one of them I want to state that others, including
| you, are not entitled to decide how I run my project.
|
| If that is the attitude that you take towards everyone who
| contributes to your project, then you probably aren't a
| very good leader. That is, of course, your right.
|
| But if you were interested in the long term survival of
| your project and attracting other developers to contribute,
| then it behooves you to consider the desires and needs of
| the community of contributors.
|
| > But I utterly reject that open source project is
| substantially similar to governing a country in
| responsibility and preferred setup.
|
| "Consent of the governed" is about countries, it is about
| leadership and where the privilege of leadership comes
| from. If you are leading a software project, does your
| authority come from god? Or does it come from the
| willingness of the people working on that project to listen
| to you? That is "consent of the governed".
| purple_turtle wrote:
| > If that is the attitude that you take towards everyone
| who contributes to your project, then you probably aren't
| a very good leader. That is, of course, your right.
|
| Word "decide" was there deliberately. I am not fully
| opposed to consideration of suggestions made by others.
|
| Though I may consider them and reject, like here.
|
| And I will take opinions of contributors into much
| serious considerations than this blog post, for multiple
| reasons.
|
| From position of maintainer in one of projects: primary
| risk to the project is main author running into too many
| annoying people and focusing on other hobbies.
|
| And I in fact did it with one of projects. Some other
| maintainers also left. The same people who caused this by
| their entitlement are now complaining about project being
| stagnant.
|
| > Or does it come from the willingness of the people
| working on that project to listen to you? That is
| "consent of the governed".
|
| Major difference is that for countries if someone does
| not consent to decisions of ruler/parliament/etc. they
| have little to no recourse.
|
| It ranges from extremely hard to impossible to change law
| or national policies or migrate to another country.
|
| In comparison the worst case of forking open source
| project is much easier.
|
| Control of open source project is much weaker and people
| forced to contribute are fairly unusual and rare (though
| in such cases I would consider my responses to blog post
| to be not applying, my comments were more focused on
| hobby projects).
|
| If someone does not want to participate they may easily
| stop. This does massively differ from countries.
| peauc wrote:
| What kind of issues are you referencing with Ruby ? I have
| followed the Wordpress drama.
| edent wrote:
| See, for example, https://joel.drapper.me/p/rubygems-
| takeover/
| jeltz wrote:
| As far as I know that is really the only example. And to
| clarify it is about a struggle between who controls
| Rubygems and Bundler, not Ruby itself. A key component to
| be sure but maybe not that relevant to this discussion
| when the ones running the infra hijacks the GitHub
| project. That was an inside coup.
| beanjuiceII wrote:
| he will present one side of the ruby story and use that as
| the moral high ground
| lapcat wrote:
| > If you look at the recent shenanigans of WordPress and
| Ruby, they are causing discontent within the existing
| organisation of contributors.
|
| This is why I think the article is a bit of misdirection.
| Your criticism is about project _governance_ not about
| project _succession_.
|
| You want the leaders of WordPress and Rails to step down now
| because you don't like how they behave in power, not because
| of the danger that the leaders might die or disappear and
| leave a power vacuum. I feel that the Mastodon example is a
| red herring here.
| edent wrote:
| Governance and succession are intimately tied. I feel that
| part of the problem with WordPress and Rails is that that
| there is no model for replacing poor governance.
| lapcat wrote:
| > I feel that part of the problem with WordPress and
| Rails is that that there is no model for replacing poor
| governance.
|
| But Eugen Rochko was not replaced. He voluntarily stepped
| down from power because he was personally dissatisfied in
| the leadership role. Nobody was calling for his ouster.
| He could have continued as leader of Mastodon for many
| more years with nobody batting an eyelash. So again,
| Mastodon is a red herring.
| msh wrote:
| There is a model, it's called forking the code.
| tremon wrote:
| Forking the code fractures the community. The discussion
| at hand focuses on the community, not the code.
| cortesoft wrote:
| If you feel like you need to fork the code, the community
| is already fractured.
|
| If the community agrees with you that the original author
| is doing things wrong, and your new approach is better,
| they will move with you to the fork.
|
| If the rest of the community doesn't agree with you, they
| will stay. If some stay and some go, it means only some
| of them agreed with you.
|
| That's the thing about open source - you don't actually
| have to form a consensus. You can split off whenever you
| want.
| munificent wrote:
| _> you don 't actually have to form a consensus. You can
| split off whenever you want._
|
| This is true and is a key property of open source.
|
| But it's also true that network effects and economies of
| scale are key for how open source projects provide value
| to their users. Those effects mean that the value an open
| source project provides to its community is often super-
| linear relative to the number of users.
|
| A concrete example: If someone writes a blog post about
| how to use some feature, every other user of the feature
| can benefit from it. But also every user can potentially
| write this kind of documentation. So the value people
| provide through documentation is very roughly quadratic
| in the number of people reading and writing docs.
|
| Because value like that scales super-linearly with the
| number of people in the ecosystem, breaking a community
| in two can result in less total value even if the total
| number of users of both communities put together is the
| same.
|
| If you fork and the forks diverge, now a given bit of
| documentation may only be relevant to one side of the
| fork. A given person writing some docs may documenting
| things that are only true for one fork.
| tracker1 wrote:
| So does trying to unseat leadership.. forking is just
| more honest and takes more effort.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| Until such a time when my compiler learns to take "the
| community" as input and still produce working binaries as
| output, things will remain _all_ about the code. C 'est
| la vie.
| ktallett wrote:
| But if it is someone's project, why should they have to
| leave if governance doesn't go the way they wish? The
| point of open source is sharing your work so others can
| use it and edit it. They have done their part and they
| maintain it as they choose whether that suits who uses it
| or not. I create open source projects myself, because
| they are applications I need or want. They are open
| source licensed so feel free to use them as such but my
| original code will develop and evolve as I choose.
| immibis wrote:
| I think this is all under the assumption that your goal
| is to make the project as successful as possible. If
| that's true, then if people think you should step down,
| you should. _BUT_ can that happen? If you 're trying to
| maximise project success, how can you also be so bad that
| people want you to step down? If you're not contributing
| but good-hearted, then you should select someone to run
| it day to day, but retain ultimate power in case that
| person turns out worse than you.
| neilv wrote:
| > _But if it is someone 's project, why should they have
| to leave if governance doesn't go the way they wish?_
|
| Many projects start as someone's project, but become
| bigger than the one person.
|
| If they keep it as one person's project, that's clear.
|
| If there are other contributors, that's less clear.
|
| If the project has a formal organization with governance,
| it's not the person's project. They might be
| grandparented in, like a vestige of a past monarchy, but
| the governance will evolve, to elections. The royalty
| will be kept for the tourism dollars.
| hobofan wrote:
| > there is no model for replacing poor governance
|
| Do you have any model to propose? Because most democratic
| models you would see for country governance (to which you
| drew parallels) rely on some key characteristics that
| don't apply to open source governance, making them not
| really transferable.
| edent wrote:
| Most organisation (in my country at least) have a written
| set of objectives and a legal structure which diffuses
| power.
|
| Any co-op, limited company, charitable association, etc
| can provide a good model - depending on the nature of the
| project.
|
| As I say, it is probably overkill for most OSS projects.
| But once you get to a certain size, I think it is obvious
| that you need a way to ensure the project's longevity.
|
| The death or disgrace of a CEO rarely destroys a company.
| There's a board their to temper their behaviour, a
| structure to ensure succession, and (most importantly) a
| set of expectations upon which their community can rely.
|
| I'm not saying that's the _only_ way to do it. I 'm not
| even suggesting it is the perfect way to do it. But I
| think it is better than _hoping_ the BDFL doesn 't
| implode.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Sadly plenty of boards are filled with CEO sycophants, so
| even that model is not immune.
| hartator wrote:
| Non-profit entity has usually more drama. And, you can
| still be "dictator" of a non-profit.
| layer8 wrote:
| Debian is an important open-source project that has had
| codified democratic governance for over quarter of a
| century now: https://www.debian.org/devel/constitution
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| One property Debian has, which most projects _don 't_
| have, is a very clearly established electorate to
| enfranchise.
|
| A few projects have a clear set of members. _Most_
| projects don 't; they have contributors of
| code/documentation/triage/community/etc, but no clear
| delineation of who is or should be an enfranchised member
| of the project. Often, projects don't end up defining
| this _until_ they need it as part of establishing some
| preferred form of governance.
| hobofan wrote:
| > A few projects have a clear set of members.
|
| Exactly.
|
| I'm not too versed in political theory, but one thing
| from my perception that provides coherence/continuity in
| nations is the immobility of participants (for better or
| worse of the individual). E.g. if you have 70/30 election
| outcome you still have to factor in the needs of the 30%
| as they may provide important economic functions and
| can't just leave on election loss.
|
| In contrast, in an open source project, even if you can
| clearly delineate membership and based on that voting
| rights for a democratic process there is very little
| preventing the "losers" from forking (it almost entirely
| comes down to brand). The outcome of that would just be
| an empty brand shell with a good chunk of their
| contribution activity gone.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Sure there is... Forking and convincing a significant
| portion of users and contributors to move with you.
|
| This happened with iojs... Which is where Node as an org
| today came from. It happened with xfree86 to xorg...
|
| It also fails plenty... I'm the the, you are not entitled
| to someone else's work. Make your own, or if the license
| permits, create your own fork... And if you lack the
| technical ability, sucks to be you.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| > Rails is that that there is no model for replacing poor
| governance
|
| poor, according to whom?
| torginus wrote:
| Wasn't the WP fight at its core about who gets to make
| money from WordPress? With the original author in one
| corner and the company with the rights to the trademark in
| the other?
|
| I'm not sure how moral posturing fits into this.
| fsckboy wrote:
| >Wasn't the WP fight at its core about who gets to make
| money ... I'm not sure how moral posturing fits into
| this.
|
| _"If you have a case where the law is clearly on your
| side, but the facts and justice seem to be against you,
| urge upon the jury the vast importance of sustaining the
| law. On the other hand, if the law is against you, or
| doubtful, and the facts show that your case is founded in
| justice, insist that justice be done though the heavens
| fall. If both the law and the facts are dead against you,
| in that case, talk around it, and the worse it is, the
| harder you pound the table."_
| btilly wrote:
| This is usually shortened to:
|
| _If the facts are with you, pound on the facts. Else if
| the law is with you, pound on the law. If neither is with
| you, pound on the table._
| ecshafer wrote:
| Communists take over a country and millions of people die.
| Fascists take over and millions of people die.
|
| Wordpress is some legal issues that is going to result in a
| law suit and some word press developer having to work
| overtime. Ruby Bundler has some people losing maintainer
| access and some hurt feelings.
|
| Lets not compare apples and oranges here.
| purple_turtle wrote:
| Or rather apples and planes.
|
| Or oranges and ICBMs.
| btilly wrote:
| Even if people are reading something into your post that you
| don't intend, they are reading it for good reason. Which is
| that your post sounds exactly like an attack on any
| technically competent person that runs an open source
| project.
|
| This fits squarely into a pattern that open source people
| deal with all of the time. Namely that someone tries to gain
| control of a project by appeals to "community", while subtly
| insulting the people who actually did the work. The result is
| toxic politics that, if it is left to stand, drives away
| technically competent contributors. And which makes leading
| that project a misery.
|
| If you don't want to come across this way, you absolutely
| need to get rid of rhetoric like the paragraph beginning
| with, _" The last year has seen several BDFLs act like Mad
| Kings."_ Anyone who has encountered this antipattern will see
| exactly what that leads to. It is a rhetorical club that can
| be levied against any technically competent person who
| objects to something based on technical concerns. The self-
| proclaimed "community leader" doesn't need to address those
| technical concerns. They just need to imply the ad hominem.
| Suggest that the contributor is the would-be Mad King. There
| are a number of ways that this can end. All of them are bad.
|
| Now I'm not saying that you are bringing up an unimportant
| issue. But you REALLY need to check your tone if you wish to
| convince the people that you are supposedly addressing.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| > Namely that someone tries to gain control of a project by
| appeals to "community", while subtly insulting the people
| who actually did the work.
|
| Lately, I've taken to labelling these different behaviors
| with D words: Doers, Discussers, Deciders, etc.
|
| It's amazing to me how often people want to create a
| specialty for themselves, where the doing is relegated to
| the doers, but all the doing is dictated by others.
|
| This happens in businesses, NGOs, communities, churches,
| just about everywhere.
| btilly wrote:
| It isn't amazing when you see how it tends to work out
| for those who succeed in a corporate context.
|
| There is a natural competition to become an "idea person"
| in an organization. If the project goes well, the idea
| person gets the credit. If the project goes poorly, the
| people who actually built it get the blame. And it takes
| far less work to produce promising ideas, than to
| actually build stuff. The result is that succeeding in
| getting other people to implement your ideas becomes a
| fast track to promotion. Unfortunately, the farther that
| you get from the actual implementation, the worse your
| ideas get. Compounding that is the fact that the ideas
| that convince executives far too often are the ones that
| play buzzword bingo in the right way, rather than the
| ones which are grounded in pragmatism.
|
| This is why I've learned to be suspicious of anyone with
| a job title of "architect". Some are amazingly good. But
| most that I've dealt with, are decidedly not. But when
| you hear them talk about it, they always sound like they
| are amazing.
| ecshafer wrote:
| > If the project goes well, the idea person gets the
| credit. If the project goes poorly, the people who
| actually built it get the blame.
|
| Oof this hits hard. So true. My first job as a developer
| at a corporation was moving from paper forms to digitally
| signed forms. We worked really hard for a year
| integrating with vendor products, saved millions of
| dollars in work time and error reduction a month,
| recurring, forever. We even got a nice call out at a town
| hall from the CEO.... we thought until the name that was
| called who "brought it all together" was some person none
| of us on the team had ever met, was never in any
| meetings, never did any work. But they probably pitched
| the idea two years ago.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| The thing to keep in mind is that _widely successful_ open
| source projects are bigger than the single person who started
| the project. These simply can 't be forked without broad
| consensus around which fork to follow.
|
| The author (who also responded) isn't referring to small
| libraries or utilities that are written by a single person and
| don't have much public contribution.
| Aperocky wrote:
| > These simply can't be forked without broad consensus around
| which fork to follow.
|
| They can and the user will decide.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Unnecessary hard forks can wast a buch of time and effort
| while damaging the community if they are contentious and
| part of a "non-peaceful" transition of power.
|
| Designing your governance and succession structure to avoid
| this is better for the long term health of your project.
| Lerc wrote:
| There seems to be a notion of 'Too big to fork'
|
| I don't think it is true. Certainly it takes more work. Broad
| consensus may be part of that work.
|
| If you cannot reach consensus to produce an equal product as
| a unilateral decision maker then the benefits of dictatorship
| are still outweighing the disadvantages.
|
| If another unilateral decision maker runs a fork, people may
| move to it if it is better. That's them voting, it's not
| dictatorship, it's representative democracy.
| umanwizard wrote:
| The Linux kernel has probably dozens of actively developed
| forks.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Do they usually take upstream changes from the main kernel?
| If so, then they aren't the kind of forks we're discussing.
|
| Think of a different scenario: Linus does something that
| pisses a lot of people off. (Even more than usual) The
| biggest contributors decide they don't want him in charge.
| The users don't want anything to do with him. A few of the
| most influential contributors announce a fork, some of the
| fans publicize it, and then the major distros base
| themselves off of the new fork.
|
| At this point none of the forks that you're referring to
| take upstream changes from Linux, instead they take them
| from the new fork.
| Lio wrote:
| There seems to be the implication that the people taking over
| are better placed to run things.
|
| You have to ask yourself though, if those trying to assume
| control can't get together and sell the idea of a new fork to
| the userbase why would they be the best people to
| successfully run the original project?
| pseudalopex wrote:
| > You have to ask yourself though, if those trying to
| assume control can't get together and sell the idea of a
| new fork to the userbase why would they be the best people
| to successfully run the original project?
|
| Assume control is a loaded phrase. And many people believe
| a fork should be a last resort.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I suggest reading this statement more carefully:
|
| > These simply can't be forked without broad consensus
| around which fork to follow.
|
| Thus:
|
| > if those trying to assume control can't get together and
| sell the idea of a new fork to the userbase why would they
| be the best people to successfully run the original
| project?
|
| That's exactly what I mean by "broad consensus."
| jjice wrote:
| Completely agreed. There has always been bits of entitlement to
| open source projects by users, but I feel like increase in
| package managers and ecosystems (which I think is generally a
| good thing) has lead to a _huge_ increase in people being
| entitled assholes to maintainers.
|
| Just look like the GitHub issues of a fairly large package with
| a single maintainer. The demanding attitude from someone who
| wants a feature that doesn't even make sense for the package to
| an individual who has a separate full time job and a family who
| does this for the love of the game is very upsetting.
| Nevermark wrote:
| There really should be a donation field "Estimated resolution
| cost" with payment options, associated with any user request.
| With a default payment preset by the maintainer to optimize
| mindfulness.
|
| "I am here to help, but you shall pay with your cash or your
| cheap guilty soul!"
| rincebrain wrote:
| The problem with that is that there's a number of examples
| about how your entitlement increases markedly when you feel
| you have paid for something.
|
| So if you don't have enough hours in the day, more money
| doesn't solve that problem unless it can displace other
| things in your schedule, and can make the number of people
| attempting to impose, and their attitudes, worse.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Good point. I feel like there should be a simple solution
| for this. You know, dealing with humans.
|
| But they are not simple.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > Just look like the GitHub issues of a fairly large package
| with a single maintainer.
|
| If there is a single maintainer then they aren't really a
| project leader since they aren't leading anyone and there is
| no community of maintainers.
|
| When there are other maintainers and other people
| volunteering their time to work on the project, then it is
| time to start thinking about succession and governance.
| zahlman wrote:
| I think this criticism doesn't go far enough. As
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45980503 says, the
| criticism appears to be more about governance than succession.
| But then, the next sentence after your quote is:
|
| > Or, if reading is too woke, just behave like grown-ups rather
| than squabbling tweenagers.
|
| To me, this makes it abundantly clear that the goal is to
| associate leadership the author doesn't like with politics the
| author doesn't like. It's in a "behold, Goofus and Gallant"
| style of diatribe that I've seen a few times before and it
| always rubs me the wrong way.
|
| Yes, a lot of FOSS projects have seen friction between the
| official leadership[1] and major players in the community. But
| it seems to come in three major forms: the kind where the
| conflict is expected and part of how those people have gotten
| along historically for years[2]; the kind where the players are
| trying to stage a coup because they don't like the leadership's
| { real-world politics, social status, opinion of pineapple on
| pizza, ... } expressed _entirely outside of development spaces_
| ; and the kind where _the project is already forked_ but at
| least one party can 't leave the other alone (sometimes because
| the project is really more about infrastructure/platform than
| software; sometimes because leadership kicked someone out, in
| an inverse of the previous situation).
|
| But swipes like the above instantly throw out all nuance and
| good will, and effectively round everything off to "all these
| bad things happen because some people just can't behave
| themselves, which _conveniently_ correlates with a caricature
| of my own political adversaries ".
|
| 1. There are plenty of cases showing that moving away from the
| BDFL model _doesn 't actually fix the problem_.
|
| 2. Believe it or not, _many_ people _actually enjoy_ operating
| that way. I hold that people who don 't have no business
| telling people who do to cut it out.
| corry wrote:
| You've got your finger on the pulse of something that open
| source has always represented to me: freedom of the creator and
| others to just... do what they want with it (subject to the
| license of course).
|
| Don't like what the main developer is doing with it? You're
| free to fork and continue on your way if they don't see it your
| way. If you lack the skills or time to do that, that's your
| problem - you're not entitled to the maintainers' labor.
|
| The freedom cuts both ways, and by adding in elements of social
| contracts and other overlays onto the otherwise relatively pure
| freedom represented by OSS, you end up with the worst of both
| worlds.
|
| THAT ALL SAID - there's an important distinction between a
| given piece of software that's open source versus a "true
| project", which is larger-scale, more contributors involved,
| might be part of mission-critical systems, etc, where the
| social dynamics DO need to careful thought and management.
|
| But even that seems to be more a question of specific types of
| OSS business models which is related but not the same as the
| licenses and overall social dynamics around OSS projects.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| Before it becomes anything else code is first and foremost
| art & personal expression.
|
| Code is a very fun form of literature at heart.
|
| Other attributes may be tacked on later, it may be integrated
| into and transform into an engine or company that has rules
| and regulations.
|
| If the author treats it as only art, with license choices,
| etc. then they aren't entitled to treat it like anything at
| all, it's literally their personal expression.
|
| And this is recognized in the physical world as well. More
| than people realize, some buildings that are incredibly
| dangerous are considered sculpture effectively. There is a
| rickety castle built by mostly one guy in CO that meets this
| criteria.
| preisschild wrote:
| > If you lack the skills or time to do that, that's your
| problem - you're not entitled to the maintainers' labor.
|
| Or give the maintainer money if he wants :)
| dogleash wrote:
| >THAT ALL SAID - there's an important distinction between a
| given piece of software that's open source versus a "true
| project"
|
| This cuts the first half of your post down to
| meaninglessness.
|
| It seems like you're just enjoying romantic thoughts about
| creator freedom in the context of projects you otherwise
| don't care about.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I'm with you on this... The whole article just seems like
| insidious, communist take over of what other people create.
|
| It usually starts with a Code of Conduct decree.. it ends with
| people who don't actually write software acting as
| authoritarian dictators in a software banana republic.
| keyringlight wrote:
| The other thing in the back of my mind is the Jia Tan
| situation with XZ utils, that was a gentle and gradual social
| engineered takeover.
| imiric wrote:
| I've read this sentiment often on this forum, and I suppose it
| shouldn't surprise me given that most people here share the
| entrepreneurial mindset. But it still rubs me the wrong way,
| and I'll write about it again.
|
| What I don't like about this idea that the role of open source
| authors ends with throwing some code over the fence,
| relinquishing any responsibility for it beyond what their
| chosen license dictates, is that it completely ignores the
| community aspect that forms around software, and in large part,
| contributes to the success of OSS.
|
| Software is written for people. Open source software explicitly
| invites collaboration, and sharing of knowledge. When someone
| sees people asking for help, and making feature and improvement
| suggestions, as "demands" from "entitled" users, they're
| completely missing this point of community. When they
| additionally require or suggest that no work will be done
| unless these entitled users pay up, it's no different from
| source available, proprietary or commercial software at that
| point. Of course your work should be compensated, and you
| shouldn't be expected to work for free. You are free to choose
| any number of viable business models to ensure that happens.
| But demanding this from your users is essentially putting the
| software behind a paywall. It also signals to users that the
| direction of the project is dictated not by a community of
| passionate users, but by whoever pays the most, which is a
| twisted incentive for any software.
|
| My point is: there is more to OSS than the code and the
| license. Despite what some may claim, there _is_ an unwritten
| social contract which is created when software is published in
| the open, whether the author decides to ignore this or not.
| Some authors do acknowledge this explicitly[1], which is a
| large factor in making their projects more successful than
| those from authors who decide to alienate their user base.
|
| [1]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-
| announce/1997/msg00017.html
| evanelias wrote:
| > Open source software explicitly invites collaboration, and
| sharing of knowledge.
|
| The licenses _permit_ that, but they explicitly do not
| "invite" it; they are totally neutral on that point. Upstream
| FOSS authors can reject all third-party contributions, and
| their software is still unarguably FOSS.
|
| > When someone sees people asking for help, and making
| feature and improvement suggestions, as "demands" from
| "entitled" users
|
| You're mischaracterizing the situation. It's usually about a
| specific small vocal subset of users, who are literally
| demanding things in a rude and arrogant manner.
|
| > Despite what some may claim, there is an unwritten social
| contract which is created when software is published in the
| open, whether the author decides to ignore this or not.
|
| "Unwritten social contracts" effectively only exist in cases
| where an _overwhelming majority_ of people believe in the
| same set of social norms. That absolutely is not the case in
| the software industry. There 's no broad agreement about what
| that social contract entails, or if it even exists, and
| therefore it de facto does _not_ exist for the industry as a
| whole.
|
| Individual projects can choose their own social norms, but
| that doesn't inherently extend those norms to the entire
| industry.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| > The licenses permit that, but they explicitly do not
| "invite" it;
|
| The whole motivation to write such "permitting" licenses is
| to invite that.
| purple_turtle wrote:
| Are you sure? For all of them?
| grokgrok wrote:
| You've drawn a neat dialectic between the hobbyist technophile
| and the community builder. If you want the help that you seem
| to eschew as rare, you could: share control through the
| delineation of roles, earn collective buy-in (consensus is
| built through some collective deliberation process, e.g
| democracy); otherwise, you're within your rights as individual.
|
| Those who expect that "those who work will work for me" (the
| enslaver mentality) ... they also need boning up on social
| contract theory -- which as a leader you could nudge those
| individuals back towards good citizenship and maybe even gain
| useful support, but that's just your opportunity and not an
| imperative.
| dsr_ wrote:
| In fact, you _only_ have consent. People who don 't want to
| work with you don't have to; everyone who does want to work
| with you _only_ does so because of mutual consent. Act badly
| and they will walk away.
| jancsika wrote:
| > If they dislike it, they can fork my project and go away.
|
| I definitely agree with you here. Forking, almost by
| definition, means the "D" in BDFL is a joke. The author
| pretending that "D" is deadly serious is an incredibly
| counterproductive and passive-aggressive way to express their
| concern.
|
| Still, the question remains-- if your project has more than a
| single developer, have you communicated to your project members
| who you think has the best knowledge and ability to take over
| after you're gone? If the only developer is you then the
| question is moot. Otherwise, it's false modesty to pretend
| that's none of your business.
| theoldgreybeard wrote:
| Why would I care when I am dead. It's just software and "bloody
| civil wars" is not something that happens over software
| governance. Oh no, some people might say mean things to eachother
| and someone might fork the software. Big Deal. Figure it out for
| yourselves like adults. Remember, the license says AS-IS and NO
| WARRANTY. Use at your own risk. I don't owe you anything. If you
| want work done on it - do it yourself or pay me.
| Jolter wrote:
| I think you're misunderstanding the point of the linked
| article. It's obviously about community-run projects, with or
| without a dictator for life.
|
| If you are running a one-man show, obviously you're in the
| right to do whatever you want. Why would you pick a successor?
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Linux will be the ultimate test for this. Linus will eventually
| retire or die. The individual that takes it from there sets the
| future for all open source. I cannot imagine open source existing
| if the kernel maintenance is squandered.
| Matumio wrote:
| Disagree, Linux is too big to fail. Too many people depend on
| it. It may get chaotic, but worst-case distributions will start
| collecting patches, as they already do for many unmaintained
| projects. Eventually one or two of them will emerge as the new
| upstream.
| purple_turtle wrote:
| I guess the worst case is that future Linux will end entirely
| controlled by Google/Facebook/, Microsoft.
| tracker1 wrote:
| While I dislike a lot of what comes out of the FAANG
| companies, even if the names change over time...
|
| I generally feel if most of them can agree on something,
| it's probably an okay direction.
|
| That's generally how politics works, where you find the
| common ground is generally the better option for everyone.
| zamadatix wrote:
| If it doesn't go to Greg Kroah-Hartman and continue much the
| same I'll eat my shoe.
| layer8 wrote:
| Greg is older than Linus.
| ema wrote:
| There has been open source before Linux and there will be open
| source after Linux. Yes Linux is a flagship project but the
| whole culture of open source is much broader than it.
| officeplant wrote:
| As soon as they opened up the possibility for AI code in the
| kernel the writing was already on the wall.
|
| See ya'll in BSD land.
| smsm42 wrote:
| Linus should take a lesson from history and appoint the
| successor in advance, and publicly groom that person for the
| role, so nobody would have any doubts.
| ziml77 wrote:
| Sorry for commenting about the page itself, but did anyone else
| have to go into reader mode to read it? The page is bouncing up
| and down, the text is extremely blurry and varying in size letter
| by letter, and every element seems randomly slanted.
| edent wrote:
| I think you might have accidentally activated the page's "Drunk
| CSS" mode - https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/09/drunk-css/
|
| Click one of the theme buttons at the top to restore normality.
| ziml77 wrote:
| That was the problem. Thank you!
| asim wrote:
| I have tried to hand off a project for years with many failed
| attempts. In the case of Mastodon they have some very high
| profile names that effectively want to relive the glory days of
| Twitter and take it over. In the case of smaller projects, you
| have to very diligent when deciding who to hand off too. I don't
| think there are great answers here.
|
| If anyone is interested https://go-micro.dev
| ferguess_k wrote:
| I think it depends on what kind of OSP they are.
|
| 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.
| Nevermark wrote:
| > The great selling point of democracy is that it allows for the
| peaceful transition of power.
|
| 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.
| riazrizvi wrote:
| This is a testament to how we can get lost in the weeds with
| ideas. The economic reality is that there's little money in open
| source, on an hourly pay basis. There's no barrier to entry, put
| in the hours and you can have a reason to work in all your spare
| time too. It's silly to compare how people treat positions of
| real economic power to them.
| shkkmo wrote:
| The leadership of large open sourcr projects do carry real
| economic power. WordPress and Ruby have real significant
| impact, Mastodon less so.
| riazrizvi wrote:
| Then the behavior would follow the traditional path, and
| there's nothing to write about, no?
| andremat wrote:
| > Build an organisation which won't crumble the moment its
| founder is arrested for their predatory behaviour on tropical
| islands.
|
| Or gets convicted of the first-degree murder of his wife.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I authored a project. Basically a framework and API, that
| gestated for over a decade. During that time, I managed it pretty
| much alone.
|
| 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.
| the_biot wrote:
| That's great, but it doesn't always turn out that way.
|
| Twice now I've started open source projects, got them to
| varying levels of success, handed over to another maintainer,
| and watched it turn to shit. Luck of the draw, I think :-(
| m463 wrote:
| "The great selling point of democracy is that it allows for the
| peaceful transition of power."
|
| that is an interesting point I didn't realize.
| smsm42 wrote:
| OSS projects are not governments, they are communities. You can't
| just come to a village and declare "I don't like how you live
| here, you therefore must have a plan of how to accommodate my
| wishes!" Nope, they don't. And the fact that you read entire two
| books on "consent of the governed" is irrelevant, because they
| are not trying to govern you. You are free to hit the road and go
| to another village anytime.
|
| 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.
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