Yeah that’s a very interesting observation, and sort of corroborates my own anecdata. More specifically, when projects are in there infancy, and there’s a lot of risk associated with working on them, I feel that management tends to stay away, which is how these heroes originate. Then, after it’s obvious that project will succeed and it’s merits are overwhelming, you see this shift in project governance/responsibility towards a more corporate mode. However, like you said, that’s probably counter productive and just creates stress and tension. If anything, I think sometimes management has an uncontrollable tendency to position itself strategically in these gatekeeper roles, whereas in open source they don’t get to do that simply by virtue of being someone’s boss, so you don’t see that same trend, as the paper argues.

Not sure if that makes sense, I quickly typed this on my phone.