Do power structures in open source project really exist when one person can fork the entire thing with the click of a button?

I could be mistaken, but I think this kind of happened with ZMQ where one contributor got annoyed and went off to create nanomsg.

Of course; when Guido Van Rossum left Python[1], he titled his email "Transfer of power" and commented "I am not going to appoint a successor. So what are you all going to do? Create a democracy? Anarchy? A dictatorship? A federation?". No doubt a lot of people would like to insert themselves as new "Benevolent Dictator for Life" - imagine the uproar if Guido had appointed a successor who nobody had heard of, but had recently bought Guido a luxury yacht. What would "fork the entire thing" look like - would Apple do it? Google? FreeBSD? Microsoft? RedHat? Would the Python dev core fracture into competing groups of stay vs leave? Just because you /can/ fork it, doesn't mean nobody has any power or influence.

Or when people complain about Linus Poettering and Systemd, either how it came to be in certain distributions, or how it took over certain subsystems, or people's behaviour around it - isn't that politics and power structures?

Or that recent post on HN ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25076197 ) where the Cairo project appears to have nobody left who is able to make a release and the last few years of releases were done by one person working at Samsung, and there hasn't been one since he left, and presumably there was no organizational structure for how to distribute this power to several people, or how to choose and "promote" someone to the job, or if nobody wants to do it, how years worth of effort came to end up on the rocks where nobody even cares anymore, isn't that a broken or absent organization one way or another?

[1] https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-committers/2018-Jul...

That sounds very interesting. Has there been any update on how successful or not his ideas are in practice?

I'm not sure. In his article on "Building Online Communities" (http://hintjens.com/blog:117) he says he experimented with building online communities for three years and gathering results, and that ZeroMQ is his biggest success (at being organised to defend to both vendor capture, or takeover by a single powerful/competent/rude contributor). For background of why that was his focus, he wrote this (http://hintjens.com/blog:125#toc15) about his experiences with working on OpenAMQ:

"""In late 2009, the Chair and Red Hat sat down and decided, in a secret meeting, to rewrite the spec. [...] From scratch. By himself. After years and years of committee work. After years of investment by others in working code. Without asking anyone except Red Hat. And then, to force this spec through the working group using his usual tactics: bullying and lobbying. [...]

One of my spin-off projects was the Digital Standards Organization, and I came to understand what was needed to protect a standard from predatory hijack. I summarized the definition of a "Free and Open Standard" as "a published specification that is immune to vendor capture at all stages in its life-cycle." What the "free" part means is, if someone hijacks your working group and starts to push the standard in hostile directions (as Red Hat did), can you fork the standard and continue? Does the license allow forking, yes or no? And secondly, does the license prohibit "dark forks," namely private versions of the standard?

If either answer is "no," then you are at the mercy of others. And when there is money on the table, or even the promise of money, the predators will move in. The AMQP experience gave me a lot of material for my later book on psychopaths. [...]

If we'd managed to build a thriving community around OpenAMQ, it would have survived. So the lesson here is simple: community before code. Today this is obvious to me. Eight years ago, it wasn't."""

And reference this (http://hintjens.com/blog:120) Social Architecture FAQ which talks about rude but highly skilled people contributing to projects (read that with "community before code" and the quote "if you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go far go together" in mind).

They're unsuccessful.

His book on Psychopathy was panned on Reddit, as well as on Goodreads:

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4c27ss/im_pieter_hint...

Likewise, the wikipedia article for Social Architecture has been listed "not notable" for the past four years, and hasn't seen any meaningful edits since 2016.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_architecture

With respect to the author, I'm not surprised. Nerds like ourselves enjoy "discovering" ideas, slapping pretentious labels on them, and then evangelizing them to the whole world... without checking if other people know more about those ideas than we do.

> Likewise, the wikipedia article for Social Architecture has been listed "not notable" for the past four years, and hasn't seen any meaningful edits since 2016.

Pieter Hintjens died in 2016.

I'm not seeing his book being panned on your Reddit link, I'm seeing ad-hom attacks on him because of his lack of credentials or some unrelated behaviour they don't like.

Is there any actual panning of his book by someone who read his book, in your link? Or anyone who engaged in good faith - e.g. it's a book about his experiences of problem behaviour patterns that hurt others?

The author himself said his book was panned on Reddit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11631424

The larger point is that the audience he chose to market to, rejected his ideas. Whether or not his audience was acting in "good faith" is irrelevant to his failure to communicate.