On Thu, Aug 31, 2006 at 11:41:41 -0700,
Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:
>
> In general, I think that people who harp on PostgreSQL's lack of a
> benevolent dictator as an inhibitor to progress are people who are not
> comfortable with democracy and are looking for excuses why company X needs
> to "take over the project for its own good."
I think Postgres is best described as ruled by an Oligarchy. I would expect
a democracy to at least include all of the developers in votes. However
when things are decided by a vote rather than consensus it is core that votes.
(I think Debian would be a good example of an open source project run as a
democracy.)
On a related comment to that story, there have been a fair number of people
stating that they think the GPL vs BSD license has been very important in
getting companies to give back to the project. I think Postgres has done quite
well with having companies give back code and resources to the project and
makes a good counter example to these claims. There probably are some license
effects, but other things also affect companies' decisions on giving back
to projects they benefit from.