[jisaacstone]

The important distinction between a software project an a government is the ease of transition.

Democracy is good because (if well designed) it protects the rights of the minority as well as the majority. But a dictatorship can use resources much more efficiently to accomplish it's goals.

Since programmers can easily switch frameworks it is better to have each guided by a strong and idealistic central leader.

I'm thinking about PHP vs Python

[baddox]

How does a well-designed democracy protect the rights of the minority?

[saraid216]

Maybe I'm not familiar enough with the PHP community, but "a strong and idealistic central leader" seems to describe Ramus fine?

[gopalv]

Rasmus wouldn't be idealistic (say compared to RMS).

I have been in contact with both over different parts of my career.

Rasmus is pragmatic. In some sense he would say "sure, go ahead and write that code" without telling you the "One PHP Way of function arguments" (yeah, look at the *sort funcs).

Actually he does worse - he will put up a patch for review that I disagree with so that I will be unable to ignore it & the only way to defend my opinion it is to fix it "properly".

That is the other extreme of being idealistic - it's being extremely pragmatic. Also being influential simply because he doesn't bother arguing on principle.