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Having never done open source before, I'm wondering about something: if an open source project is started, once it becomes popular and attracts community of developers and other contributors I assume the power shifts from the guy who started the project to the community. Does the person who started the project still retains his power to boot out the assholes from his project or not?

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It depends. The founders tend to hang around and retain power. Larry Wall (Perl) and Guido van Rossum (Python) have kept a fair amount of control and strongly encouraged a friendly atmosphere. Debian Linux became a voting democracy and is reasonably pleasant.

Nothing stops someone from forking an open source project, making their own version. The BSD Unixes are famous for schisms, and some of the new founders are famously ... opinionated. One of benefits of open source is that obnoxious but competent people boot themselves out.

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