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...