When Django started out, the original two biggest contributors were "BDFLs" (i.e., had final decision-making authority).
They stepped back from that years and years ago. If for some reason there's a decision that desperately needs to be made, but for which no decision is coming out of the normal processes, there's a technical board, elected by committers, rotating every release cycle, that can be asked to make the call (disclaimer: I've served three terms on Django's technical board).
But in both the BDFL era, and the current technical-board era, the people with final decision-making authority only exercised it when asked to, as a last resort when other mechanisms had failed.
For the final decision-maker to actively step in and veto something the normal decision process already has consensus around, or just pre-emptively declare something decided against what seems to be a consensus buliding the other way... is unthinkable for me. I'd treat it as a sign that it's time either to fork away from that person, or to remove that person's decision-making authority and put the authority in the hands of someone more responsible.
Sadly, I very much agree. I think RMS has done an incredible amount to protect software freedom, and virtually every single person in the world benefits in some way or another. However, this is an authoritarian response and assertion of control where one need not be. We have plenty of power-hungry dicks out there, we don't need them to have a famous example to emulate.
Note: I am not convinced yet that RMS was serious. I'm waiting for him to come out and say, "lol jk wuz troll." My opinion stated here assumes he was being serious.
I don't think you can have one without the other. GNU was successful in large part because of RMS's uncompromising position on issues both big and small. RMS is not, and never was, a "power-hungry dick". He just has strong and well-defined political views, and the GNU project was created to reflect those views.
Unfortunately, at times I look at GNU and see that it's a project whose success is in spite of RMS. He gave a good basis in the original manifest, gave generally good inspiration, but that's what it is - inspiration. Said inspiration made people work on the projects that over time somehow managed to end up under GNU umbrella. But a lot of RMS-managed, top-down GNU projects? Never got anywhere.
See also the discussion mentioned by Ulrich Drepper back in 2001, regarding RMS' behaviour back when Ulrich started to port glibc to linux.
> For the final decision-maker to actively step in and veto something the normal decision process already has consensus around, or just pre-emptively declare something decided against what seems to be a consensus buliding the other way... is unthinkable for me.
Especially on so trivial an issue. This is what RMS wants to throw his weight around for?
They stepped back from that years and years ago. If for some reason there's a decision that desperately needs to be made, but for which no decision is coming out of the normal processes, there's a technical board, elected by committers, rotating every release cycle, that can be asked to make the call (disclaimer: I've served three terms on Django's technical board).
But in both the BDFL era, and the current technical-board era, the people with final decision-making authority only exercised it when asked to, as a last resort when other mechanisms had failed.
For the final decision-maker to actively step in and veto something the normal decision process already has consensus around, or just pre-emptively declare something decided against what seems to be a consensus buliding the other way... is unthinkable for me. I'd treat it as a sign that it's time either to fork away from that person, or to remove that person's decision-making authority and put the authority in the hands of someone more responsible.