> I kinda thought the whole idea behind open source is that no one company or group of companies/licensees gets privileged access to or control over the software, including any company that happens to have the same name as the piece of software.

That is not, at all, the idea behind open source. The idea behind open source is, basically, 'you are free to do whatever you like with the source code, as long as you credit us for our work and don't hold us responsible for any effects of using the work'. That's it. There is nothing about companies, corporations, licensees, who has control, who has what name, etc. All of that is irrelevant to open source at its core.

It's true that many people add on an open governance model (e.g. Rust) and mistakenly think that that is part of open source. It's not though.

> There is nothing about companies, corporations, licensees, who has control, who has what name, etc.

That’s exactly what I said.

It's quite different from what you said ;-)

I don't believe this is a realistic take on open-source. There's not a single successful modern OSS project that's not basically controlled by a single organization (or was not at some point in its conception). Control can take multiple forms: most of the time, it's directional to the project, since the roadmap of the company managing the project dictates what gets done. Sometimes, it's in the form of how you can use the project. The great thing is that you can always fork the project and create a version for which the new rules/direction does not apply. The challenging part is making that a project where active development is actually happening.

Certainly, there's things like the Linux Foundation that serve as places where projects can live without formal control by a single organization, but in practice, orgs that commit most of the code control things (for better or for worse - I'm not saying this is a good thing)

> I don't believe this is a realistic take on open-source. ... The challenging part is making that a project where active development is actually happening.

Well, yeah, that’s just the most obvious gut reaction everyone has when they first hear about open source software: Why in the world would anyone put work into software that’s free for everyone to use? My impression is that open source advocates have put tons of work into explaining why this can and does actually work and can result in software that’s better than proprietary alternatives.