Deferring to one’s community seems to be more obviously aligned with democratic values, but open source’s distributed nature makes that ideal challenging to live up to. If maintainers were to defer to their community, how could they assess overall opinion, given the lack of clear membership boundaries? Countries have citizenships and constituencies, but open source projects are open to anyone. If someone made a one-time contribution to Opal, does that make them a “contributor” in the same sense as a lead maintainer?
