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.

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. I don't think the metaphor of a king's death is apt here, because nobody has died or become incapacitated. They've just become overtly contemptible.

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.

> Which is why I am delighted that the Mastodon project has shown a better way to behave.

I think we should hold our breath for a moment. The wars waged over concession don't always happen immediately, and not always involving the expected parties [1].

> Today, we’re marking another momentous step in this ongoing process as our Founder and now former CEO Eugen Rochko begins his transition into a new role with Mastodon. We are thrilled that he will continue on in an advisory role with our team.

The problem with the undead King is if they ever feel the need to exercise any form of power.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Hastings

There should be P.E Firms run by OSS devs concentrating in being the succession and exit plan for OSS founders while charging big tech cos ($1bn+) for support.

Might sound a bit evil at first but it is the way to bolster the whole xkcd issue.

I struggle to find out who is this aimed at, really.

It's clear there is a lot of drama in Opensource projects lately, but there are countless projects where the maintainer would be thrilled to have one or two people that would actually want to invest their time into reviewing some code with him. Day the find others pumped by their work and willing to invest some time would be celebrated with cake each year.

Just because someone else's broken CI pipeline does "Several thousands of downloads of NPM package per day" should not make you feel bad that you have not "Build an organisation which won't crumble" yet.

That's backwards. You want to help those people? Create that organization. Create another Apache org and take over important projects that need that.

It really feels like banging the wrong drum. Just another person having a broken curl setup and blaming Daniel Stenberg for it.