I always felt the Lazarus community as a democracy. You can advise, make suggestions or disagree, you always get an answer.
What makes it a democracy I think is that the answers are always respected.
If you get a No on your suggestion, then that's it and if you get a Yes enjoy your win, but I never felt this community or the developers as dictators. The answer the way they do for a reason.
It's respect for others that makes this community enjoyable, please let's keep it like that.
The terms carry lots of weight from history. We are clearly talking about different things.
Answering questions and having respect for others has nothing to do with making decisions.
I know that in countries led by dictators, like military dictators in South America and the former Soviet Union, people were imprisoned just by having a "wrong" opinion. It is currently happening in North Korea.
"Democratic" countries were considered to be the opposite, having a freedom of speech and opinion.
However this distorts the original meaning of democracy which is about a decision making process.
Also in my writing it only has the original meaning of decision making process.
A "dictator" by itself does not mean an "evil dictator". A dictator is only a person who has unlimited power. If he uses it for good then he is a "benevolent dictator".
The problem of course is that the possession of power spoils a person, and the possession of infinite power spoils him infinitely.
There are reasons why this may not happen with open source project dictators. I can explain more later if somebody is interested.
Most of the decisions made by developers are low level implementation specific decisions.
How do I improve the Delphi converter so that a required unit is always added to the uses section when an object type is replaces with a fall-back type? Should I make a vote for it at forum? Obviously not. Nobody else knows the code well enough to have an opinion.
I must figure it out myself. During the process I may ask specific questions from Mattias because I use his codetools. Mattias is helpful. There is no conflict of interests. The only problem is my limited brain capacity but I want to use all there is.
Yet, I am a
dictator for that part of Lazarus code because I know it best. I am not an evil dictator, I would even give my position away any time to someone with enough talent and energy.
Sometimes a higher level decision comes up which cannot be decided by a single sub-system dictator.
In some projects a top level dictator would decide. In Lazarus project a consensus is found. It is possible as long as everybody respects the work done so far by others.
Now there are people who want to change the splash screen without doing anything else for the project.
The splash screen has become a symbolic thing. A trophy. A symbol of power.
It is a techincally small but psychologically big thing. If the decision power was given to those people, would they remain as "benevolent dictators"? I doubt. Just think of human history...