[shadowgovt]

One of the advantage to the more hierarchical approach found in many commercial software development houses is that someone has the authority to say "These are about the same, we're doing it this way, the decision is arbitrary, and anyone who doesn't toe the line can work on something else."

Makes it easier to avoid burning time on problems with equivalently-good solutions, or even not-equivalently-good-but-perfection-isn't-worth-the-cost-of-discovery.

[denton-scratch]

Non-hierarchical decision-making is hard work, and time-consuming. There are lots of challenges - it can be hijacked easily by arseholes, you need lots of rules that everyone has to learn, and nobody agrees on what "consensus" means.

Nevertheless, I think that if you can make it work then you get better decisions. Debian's been pretty good at it (systemd aside :-)