| Your statement certainly did not come across as tongue-in-cheek. Gerald Weinberg developed the concept of "egoless programming" as a counter to people who feel that criticism of their work corresponds to criticism of them personally. I suggest you read http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?EgolessProgramming . I can't even begin to figure out what a "more democratized" system would look like, and you didn't describe how the principles of democracy apply here. It sounds like you have confused a mandatory consensus requirement with democracy. Democracy does not require unanimous consensus. Your one and only right, in the context of free software, is that you can take on the code development and yourself. Github even gives you the ability to do all of that yourself. You don't need someone to "hand over the reigns", you can take it up yourself. If you do a better job of development, maintenance, community relations, and so on, than the original group then go for it. No one is stopping you. You worry about fragmentation. That's a false worry. Most programers fork, make a couple of changes, and stop. Because continued development of a given project on ones own is hard. But if you want to take on the challenge, again, go for it. Don't complain about how people have offended your honor. As to your last statement. You are just wrong. I have no obligations. Zero. None. Nada. To insist on such shows a complete lack of understanding of the reasons for why some people release software. To insist that an obligation exists will lead to problems. I've gone on holiday, or otherwise not worked on a project for several months. Do I have an obligation to check for pull requests during that time? What if I take a year off? When does the obligation kick in? If I switch carriers, go to jail, or die, am I obligated to "hand over the reigns"? The answer to all of these is "no." Now, if I wanted to do community building, then that's a different question and a different answer. I've released software which was a week-long experimental project. I used it to explore an idea then released it so that others might use it as a stepping stone. I have no obligation to make that be the "best software" it can be, especially if the best solution is to write a totally new system using the lessons learned. How do you even know what "best" will be? Developing software is a journey, and as you saw, wolfeidau even said that your changes "don't match what I want to do with this module." What you've said is that you want the best Caribbean holiday that can be, while wolfeidau wants to go to the South Pacific. You can't both have the same best holiday with the same boat at the same time. |