Flawed democracy [LWN.net]

Flawed democracy

Posted Apr 30, 2008 18:07 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)
In reply to: ELC: Morton and Saxena on working with the kernel community by darwish07
Parent article: ELC: Morton and Saxena on working with the kernel community

That doesn't look like a true democracy to me. For me the ultimate test to check if something is a democracy is: can a subverter (e.g. someone like Fidel Castro) do it and claim that it is still a democracy? In this case the kernel doesn't pass muster; Castro might subvert a system without written rules.

Not that it is necessarily a bad thing; as others have said, as long as anyone can elect to be out of the process it has to be a fair process or languish. That is better than a democracy IMHO.

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Linux does past your test

Posted May 2, 2008 5:17 UTC (Fri) by anandsr21 (guest, #28562) [Link]

Even Linus cannot subvert the process. His request can be turned down by the maintainer, and
if he tried to force the kernel will fork. Even if Linus, Morton and the subsystem maintainer
try together to hoodwink the whole community, it will not be easy to prevent a fork.

Depends on how you define it

Posted May 2, 2008 10:22 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

Think about it as "gaming the system", OK? Maintainers are after all elected by Linus himself, without any external oversight, so you can assume they are of one mind. And the same goes for Morton. They could stage all a revolt against Linus but the outcome would not be sure either way.

Forking as you say is hard to prevent, but IMHO it is out of the question; in this case people are getting out of the system. It is like people fleeing a tyrannic country, which may or may not be prevented by the authorities (remember when Castro encouraged balseros to go and "invade" Miami). Of course in this case it is the crucial point, so maybe we are splitting hairs here.