bq. I think all the stuff about open governance is creating the wrong idea of a democracy in the minds of some people, while it clearly isn’t.
Open governance is not democratic. It clearly calls itself meritocratic right in the first sentence of the page I linked to. Democracy is not even mentioned.
bq. Open governance doesn’t extend all the way down to the bottom,
It might not be perfect, but it actually works pretty well from my experience.
Of course I read posts by Lars or Thiago more carefully than those by people I have never noticed before.
That is a social thing: People you have worked with before and found reliable/trustworthy/competent or whatever do get a bonus in all future interactions.
bq. ... it is more of a thin layer whose purpose is to attract more small contribution while keeping the core of decision making detached.
That has never been my impression.
bq. I’ve seen developer base requests ignored, often by means of “do it yourself then” statements, I’ve even seen cases where people actually do it themselves and even offer to contribute it just to have it rejected.
Of course that will happen. My requests are sometimes ignored, too, just as some of my patches are rejected. Most have to go through several rounds of review before I can submit them.
There are many reasons to reject patches, "I do not know that person" or "that company sucks" are not among those though.
bq. As Tobias Hunger said, those who “contribute” the most have the call, and that just so happens to be a company named Digia, [...]
I am maintainer of the version control code in creator and personally work with several maintainers that are not employed by Digia, that are responsible for individual VCS implementations. I do follow their lead in all that effects their plugin only.
Yes, I do overrule some ideas where they change interfaces that effect more than one VCS. Making sure that everything works well together is my job, of course I take the right to reject patches that effect that.
bq. [...] so technically no one contributes more than Digia, and at the core, decision making is a subject of managers and corporate politics, much like everywhere else.
That has never been my experience in Qt/Nokia. I have always experienced the Qt department as very developer driven. This is even more true in Digia.
bq. Qt is a product in decades of development by a significantly big team of experienced professional developers, so at this point in time, I think it is pretty much impossible to do anything that can contribute to such an extent as to make your voice prominent enough.
All you need to be invited to the "Qt Contributor Summit":http://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/2013/05/14/qt-cs-please-register/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=qt-cs-please-register is approver status. That is not too hard to get, even without dedicating a lot of resources into one aspect of the Qt ecosystem.
