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Comment by netbioserror | Hacker News Reader

I'm more partial to a BDFL than a committee, so I'm not sure why I'd prefer this fork. Community management is not a de facto improvement.

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I'd have agreed with you a year ago, but the WordPress debacle shows that the BDFL concept really hangs on the "benevolent" part of the job description. If your BDFL goes rancid your only option is to fork, and hostile forks are very difficult to pull off because it almost invariably forks the community.

The BDFL archetype is basically Plato's philosopher king. It's a nice and appealing idea in theory, and works well if you get a good one (Matz for Ruby, by all accounts). But it's risky, and it's hard to be sure yours is actually benevolent and will stay benevolent.

The philosopher king analogy doesn’t hold water because forking is an option.

Where is the WordPress fork?

There is none because forking the code doesn't automatically bring the community along with you, and so no one wants to risk the instability that would inevitably come from forking. When a project needs a fork it usually much more closely resembles a civil war than it does a succession, and the whole system becomes weaker because of it.

Why would we start with a model that we know will permanently weaken our community when we inevitably need to trigger a succession?

https://www.classicpress.net/

https://whitelabelpress.org/

There's no fork because there's no need for a fork.

If the WordPress idiot was like "I'm going to make WordPress worse, and I don't care what anyone thinks", there would be a fork. But that's not what's happening. What's happening is that one WordPress host (the official one) is miffed that other hosts aren't paying a tax for the use of (100% open source) software.

That makes the guy in charge an idiot who doesn't understand OSS, and his idiocy is helping to destroy his entire company ... but he's just being a bully: he's not hurting anyone's use of the software.

Ergo, no fork.

Who cares, I think everyone for the point.

And forking is like civil war.

BDFL is a good concept. As long as money stays out of it. If the DFL collects money in a for profit Organisation and isn't transparent about usage, this is unsatisfactory to other contributors.

I am not sure there is a huge market for selling the company, though, given the track record of the owners for taking the money and then forking away and trying to pull the users over.

It sounds like the problem is that they don't trust the BDFL to be B, since they're asking for more financial transparency and a bunch of other stuff.

I could have been a BDFL for a project that I authored, but chose against that.

I often say that the best thing that I ever did for the project, was walk away from it. The team that took it over, has made it extremely successful.

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