"Some people misunderstand what the open source community is (like I did). It's not like a family, it's more like a dictatorship."

Yes, a dictatorship of a kind. It's usually known as 'meritocracy' since the one that makes it, it's the one that dictates what's done.

"in fact, it makes choosing what software to use easier. Technical merits only."

Well, then I'd say you didn't get the (full) point. Given the almost unencumbered power the developer gets on the codeline, it does matter who the developer is when you are going to invest into any given program.

As an example, back in the nineties Postfix and QMail were strong contenders in the SMTP arena. Postfix led by Wietse Venema and QMail led by D.J. Bernstein, both of them brilliant people on their own merits. Main difference? Character. While both were (are) hard workers (the only way to make sure where the codeline is going in this environment is to write it yourself at least most of it, remember?) and strongly opinionated, which is good to lead a project, Venema is quite open to criticisms and positive into helping people (that shows to have done his homework) and Bernstein is, well, just strongly opinionated.

When I decided to move out of Sendmail I tried thoroughly both programs and probably QMail was a bit stronger back then but since I expected to invest a lot of my time in that area (which, I did) I still ended up favoriting Postfix (and I still do) because of Venema. Now Postfix is stronger than QMail, which is basically stagnated.

Moral of the story: people matters.

"Speaking as a CEO, I don't want my suppliers to be stupidly profitable"

All well and good, but that doesn't make Red Hat any bigger. It is still a small fish, which is what was considered here.

"Perfect is the enemy of good. If you want stable, stay on Release N-1 or N-2. Don't hold others back from trying to make something better."

That would be good if those developers so proud of the shiny novelty wouldn't get back to you when pointed to bugs on the N-1 or N-2 releases telling "oh, upgrade to N because I don't have the time nor the inclination to fix bugs on N-2 (while certainly I had the time to introduce them to start with)".

And then, nobody is holding you back from trying to produce something better but from pushing it to production just because you THINK it's better.

"Yeah, we shouldn't have released X11 until it was 100% bug free either..."

Another strawman.

"...or at least more bug-free then the thing they will replace"

It was already there, in the parent post.

And even then, nobody was talking about "releasing" but being used in a production environment.

"Seriously this fetish the community has with every new thing being 110% feature compatible and complete with the old the moment it hits github is getting tired."

The strawman argument is what's getting tired.

1) No one asks for your petty project to be 110% feature compatible with anything when it hits github.
2) What people asks is for THINGS ALREADY RELIABLY WORKING, being at least as good as the old thingie PRIOR TO BE PROMOTED TO A PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT.
3) For it to be accepted into a production environment, the new thingie has not only to be as good as the old thing but BETTER by a factor that makes it worthy the expenditure in relearning and readapting old systems and people to the new thing. And then add an extra margin to cope with the risk that in the end things may not end as expected.

I know it's in the human nature but what it's tiring is for each new generation know-it-alls to throw away the experience and knowledge of the ones that came before and then even telling they "find tired" when told, no boy, you don't know it all.

"Where has this absurd notion that text logs are efficient come from?"

From the vast army of sysadmins left with a broken server to see what happened and how to recover it.

"Text based logs generate a huge amount of redundant network traffic."

For one is not a "huge amount", for other, redundant is good here because it means it'll be easy to extract meaning out of a (slightly) corrupted stream. Try that from a 0 redundancy stream.

"Wht ime is it?" - What did I intend to say?
"89035213492" - Is this the number I intended to transmit?

"Or, you might check the issue tracker and you will find that network logging is on the to-do list."

And this quite says it all.

Despite still lacking basic features and obviously being a moving target, someone wants it as the default for such an important component as the init system for the Stable version of one of the most used and respected distributions known, among other things, for not adding variations once frozen (remember the thing about "moving target"?).

"You absoloutely tell him what you want the walls made out of and where you want them, where you want the electrical accessories, what type of heating system you want and where you want ht bits of it, and so-on. All of those things are discussed between you and and your architect and submitted to planning/building regs for approval before the builder is hired."

Or else?

Think on your "or else" clause and see if or how can be applied to a community-driven effort like Debian. Then you'll start to understand.

"If you are funding development of the distro you absoloutely should tell those things."

Absolutly. It's only you are not funding developers.

"If they ignore you and you can get sufficient developers to agree with you then a fork or derivative may be in order."

Good luck with that while, from my experience it shows and uttely lack of understandment of how human nature works. You won't get developers to agree with you. You'll develop on you own and once your code start showing its merits, then you might start seeing other developers going your way.

"Show me the code" is a known saying for a matter.

"I disagree. The point of being in a community is to... be a part of a community. As you describe it, there is no community, there are just two groups of people. Developers and users. If the users don't like what the developers are doing, the developers are free to leave. They will be replaced by people who respect others in the community."

Are you really so naive or just trolling? Because what you are saying is the exact opposite to reality.

And not because a matter of moral judgement, what's right and what's wrong, but a matter of making things happen.

A user doesn't make things happen, a developer does.

So it is not "If the users don't like what the developers are doing, the developers are free to leave" but "If the users don't like what the developers are doing, the *users* are free to leave" because what power has a user to make a developer do what he doesn't want to do? And what power has a user to make a developer resign while he's still doing what he likes to? Moreso on a purely community-driven project where the user doesn't even have the proxy of a corporation that pays the developer's wages.

"More users means more promoters, more promoters means more potential developers. Those developers will replace the "my way or the highway" devs that are currently taking charge"

No. Even if it happens the way you say, the new developers will be another generation of "my way or the highway" because the user still won't have any ability to make developers do what they don't feel inclined to do.

In other words: the only way for a user to make things happen is to stop being just a user and become a developer and once that happens, it will also be "his way or the highway".

"> Last time I noticed I do not all systemd on all of my servers. Do you say now is mandatory to install it?

systemd is the default init system, etc. in Debian Jessie.
It is currently undecided if other init systems will be supported,"

Point being that, being Debian what it is, and even more because of its constitution, once systemd enters the show other init system will not be supported no matter what a ballot says because systemd is very pervasive and no Debian Developer is under the obligation of add a single line of code they don't want to.

"> When RH (which is, both in business model and revenue, a small player in the IT panorama)

I continue to hear this and see absolutely no evidence of it. I see evidence to the contrary, in the US, India and Europe, over the last 20 years.
Generally, it's RPM/RH that is first listed."

Microsoft 2014 sales Income: 86.73B
Oracle's: 38.28B
SAP: 17B
CA: 4.5B

And then, Red Hat, 1.5B

So yes, there's evidence that Red Hat is a small fish in the pool.

"So in other words the massive egos are butthurt that in a FOSS environment the USERS get a say in things?"

No, it isn't, since here USERS don't get a say in things. Only Debian Developers do.

"Frankly its asses like this that will end up making a Debian fork successful,"

No it won't, because USERS don't produce forks, developers do.

"Really. Could it not just be that it's toxic? Or at least he considers it to be so?"

Yes, certainly. But this doesn't make the parent poster's assertion any more wrong. How many people have _you_ seen talking about some organization as toxic while they are getting their way? It's usually only once they don't get their way that they see it toxic.

And looking at this case, it looks a bit strange that there's no reasoning neither on the resignation letter nor down the thread it induced.

"Wow... lots of incredibly defensive responses. Almost as if these people feel threatened by someone with 3 months of education in their field."

They should be.

As specially the last 30 years has tought us, it's not about your ability but about what the big executives think.

If big executives want to think 3 months is all it takes and is all it's worth, they are doomed, and the whole world with them.

"Otherwise, (besides Mars being smaller and colder and having no magnetic field) they're pretty similar."

So you make his point: worse case scenario, Earth won't be any worse than Mars, so it seems wiser to...
a) hope for the best: maybe Earth's worst case scenario doesn't happen
b) Only once worse case scenario you go afte the "terraforming" endevour, only here, in the Earth, instead of going to Mars to do the same in a worse planet: being shorter you will always have a harder day to sustain an atmosphere there than in the Earth.