| Imagine a building whose design and construction was governed by democracy. The architecture would be a horrible mish-mash of whatever happened to be popular, and likely architecturally unsound and unsafe. The actual construction would be a nightmare too, since someone would have the "brilliant" idea of painting drywall before laying it so people don't have to use unsafe ladders, ect. Software can be millions of times more complicated than building blueprints. Why in the hell do you think democracy will work for software when it doesn't work for office buildings? Contrast this with the way open source development generally proceeds. A single developer (or maybe a few) create a software project as the core team. They are the experts for that project. Other people can make suggestions and contribute, but it's up to the core team to decide if something meshes with the vision they have for the project. What if someone disagrees? They can simply fork the project and try out their own vision. They are the expert of their own project. This has some amazing consequences. First of all there can be multiple winners. Project A can be very popular, yet project B, which caters to a minority, can also exist and serve people with different needs and tastes. Second, it allows parallel experiments of multiple ideas, which encourages rapid innovation to take place. Finally, it helps minimize conflict between people, since you can join or start a project that meets your fancy without penalty. Contrast this with democracy. In a democracy it's winner take all. Majority vote determines what everyone has to live with. This creates conflict and intense competition (including bribes and corruption) to get majority vote. It slows innovation because things can only be done one way at a time, whichever way was popular. There can be no single vision, everything becomes a huge contorted mess. It's hard enough to architect software with a single vision. You should be doing research on how to make politics more like the (multi)governance of open source development, not the other way around! |
I haven't seen that, so it's hard to imagine (and I would thus reserve my judgement on that). But I have seen comedy governed by democracy, and it's not as bad as you suggest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Python But I do agree it's a mish-mash. :-)
Anyway, I think it's hard to make the OSS model work in politics. In politics (and other fields), you are severely resource constrained. However, in OSS model, anybody can fork the code on their own system.