I've thought about this a LOT, more specifically about the implications of the fact that open source projects are treated as _both_ communities AND code as a si

I've thought about this a LOT, more specifically about the implications of the fact that open source projects are treated as _both_ communities AND code as a single entity at the same time instead of independently so. This gives the owner of the project a large amount of weight not only in the direction of the project's code, but also in the community as a whole, which can have some substantial negative impacts I believe. With many open source projects started by non-companies, you end up with community leaders who are a few people in the scene who started the project or contributed to it heavily and care about the space a lot. Most importantly, their views are affected largely by the community -- they're "one with the community" so-to-speak. With the introduction of large companies managing OSS projects, there is a new aspect in which sub-communities grow. This allows for one side of the community (almost never the company's side) to become "a group of people to communicate our changes to" rather than a group of people to actually collaborate with. I could list several examples of this happening, but I don't want to anger anyone from these companies against me personally and don't feel like creating a throwaway account. Treating OSS projects as communities and code has some nice qualities, and certainly having paid engineers from companies working on these projects has nice properties, too, but we're not honest with ourselves about the downsides and risks and people regularly give _more_ weight to projects created by companies without warrant (I've seen 20% projects by Google on the front page of /r/programming without even so much as a README -- something that would never happen if it wasn't "created by a FAANG")