The Peaceful Transfer of Power in Open Source Projects
6 comments
·November 19, 2025JimDabell
A long-standing succession plan also reduces the likelihood of a supply-chain attack. A fed-up maintainer deciding to quit is the worst possible time to pick a successor.
lapcat
I'm not sure there's much utility in this article. It feels like the point was mainly to dunk on Ruby on Rails and WordPress without mentioning them by name. And such dunking may be justified, but it's not particularly interesting and won't lead to an enlightening discussion.
I think it's crucial to point out, though, that Eugen Rochko's motives for stepping down were explicitly personal. He's still quite young, Mastodon itself is still quite young, less than a decade old, and Rochko could have continued in his position for some time. He stepped down because he wanted to step down, not for some selfless reason like succession planning. And I'm not criticizing Rochko for that; he can live his life the way he chooses and do what makes him happy, avoid what he finds unpleasant. And he's to be commended for the mentioned peaceful transition of power. However, there's no inherent reason why Matt Mullenweg or DHH should step down just because Rochko stepped down; their personal goals are obviously different. And Rochko behaved very differently while he was still leading Mastodon.
The author clearly wants those other leaders to step down because he doesn't like those leaders and how they behave, not because of some abstract idea of succession planning.
John-Tony
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John-Tony12
[dead]
charlesdicken
[dead]
Comparing software projects to governments usually produces the wrong intuition. The stakes are much lower, and risk tolerance should be much higher with a software project. Dictators are good, forks are good, even conflict can be good because it means people care. On the contrary, democracy leads to mediocre decisions, designs by committee, and sluggishness.
Unlike with a government, you can easily walk a way from a software project or create a fork. There is almost zero friction to "voting with your feet" in software and it works.