Linux does past your test [LWN.net]

Linux does past your test

Posted May 2, 2008 5:17 UTC (Fri) by anandsr21 (guest, #28562)
In reply to: Flawed democracy by man_ls
Parent article: ELC: Morton and Saxena on working with the kernel community

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.

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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.