I read the entire article carefully, thinking about various other schisms in the Open Source World (Net/OpenBDS being the one that came to my mind first) - and reflected on how important leadership is in many of those communities. For better or worse, the (in most cases) benevolent dictatorship of people like Theo (OpenBSD), Linus (Linux), and Guido (Python) play an important role in herding their respective cats.

It might be interesting to see how effective (if such a thing could even be measured) communities with benevolent dictators perform as compared to those that operate by consensus/voting.