Kathy Sierra nails it.

This issue of consensus and everyone’s opinion having equal weight and deserving equal attention pops up all the time in development. Experience counts for a lot and we’re not real good at recognizing that these days the result is we make stupid mistakes over and over because newbies are given too much latitude and the old dogs are “so yesterday man”. Of course, there are projects that get stuck in a rut precisely because the old dogs do need to learn some new tricks.

Consensus can really only be achieved in a very small group with similar mindsets and even then it can take a lot of arguments and therefore a lot of time. I don’t think it’s a surprise then that many of the “successes” (be that Linux or Apple) are run by benevolent dictators as that seems to me to be the only way to make reasonable progress.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out in respect of Apache River….