Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Forthcoming Book: The Art Of Community

[Brian Bartholomew (bb]

| The next most fundamental difference is that the political system of
| open source software development is nonexistent -- it is an anarchy --
| there is no politics or government.

> Sounds like cohousing to me!

Not to me.  When I looked into this a couple years back, it seemed
that nearly all cohos had a legally binding, enforced-by-the-courts-
and-police, majority vote in their bylaws to make the lenders happy.
In some places this consciously affects the "consensus" decisions;
as Rob Sandelin said: "Knowing that you need to compromise or
eventually get outvoted moves things and generally we are able to get
permission for most things once they are modified."  That's politics!

Whereas, in open source land, there is no force, so there is no
politics.  Conflict may remain unresolved forever, and developers
aren't blocked from doing their own thing.  Open source software
operates on a very pure (and very rude and noisy) form of consensus.

                                                        Brian