[saghm]

Is the biggest user larger than the combined set of individual users who had asked for (or would benefit from) the same thing? I honestly don't know, but I don't think that things are always as simple as you're implying in a world where we have the collective action problem.

[brookst]

If you’re asking some some kind of abstract moral value sense, I have idea.

If you’re asking whether project leads give more weight to a single, tangible, vocal stakeholder than they do to unknown numbers of anonymous and lightly-engaged stakeholders? Yes.

[WorldMaker]

Not to mention when the single, tangible, vocal stakeholder can also be asked to be responsible for documentation (PEPs, etc) and PRs. Especially in open source there is a huge difference between "a lot of people asked about this" and "one person asked about this, but was passionate enough about it and open enough to following the process and the feedback loops to champion it all the way across the finish line".

[saghm]

I don't have any issue with what you're saying if that's what happened. There's quite a gap between that sort of reasoned explanation and treating concerns about large stakeholders versus large numbers of small one with derision.

[WorldMaker]

For what it is worth, I was trying not to make a value judgment on it, especially not with relation to this specific instance, I was hopefully just recognizing it as a motivating factor in general open source politics. Sometimes that is quite regretful because it is anti-democratic and does look like favoritism or worse cronyism when it plays out in that way of "we listened to the person/company that built and tested a prototype and did all the work to standardize and then PR it over the many developers that wanted an idea but didn't have the time/money/bandwidth to implement it themselves".

[saghm]

That's fair. I think I mostly reacted because of the sarcastic faux-outrage that the original comment I responded to expressed. These are hard problems, and I think the presumption should be someone being frustrated at the slow state of changes they want probably has legitimate reasons to feel that way, just as the presumption should be that open-source projects that have run successfully for a long time probably are making good-faith effort to steward what they're maintain. Acknowledging the tension between priorities not lining up exactly for everyone and not having knee-jerk reactions when someone is unhappy seems preferable to mocking those who you disagree with.

[saghm]

I mean, yes, demonstrably, the phenomenon you're describing happens. Your previous comment seems pretty sarcastically dismissing the idea that someone could disagree with this being a good thing though, and I was making a counterargument against the underlying opinion that seemed apparent.