This hugely assumes that the point of an open source project is to have other people do it, and 'caring about it' means doing the work of it. Not always true.

This hugely assumes that the point of an open source project is to have other people do it, and 'caring about it' means doing the work of it. Not always true. My own open source world operates on different principles: I'm there to explore in a particular direction, not always fruitfully. Near as I can tell there isn't anybody else walking that particular beat, which among other things implies that it's a really niche interest, and that suits me just fine. But it means I can't get other devs in to pursue this direction, because they simply won't. So my use of open source turns into a one-way faucet: rarely is there a situation where I'm able to take anything back, it's always about facilitating other people to build THEIR projects making use of whatever they find useful in my codebase. I almost never get any help with my project, and this is fine. Maybe it works better for everyone that I don't try to get people to do my will, don't treat them as dumb paid labor. People are often very clever but caught up in doing things I don't find at all useful, not unlike the author's objections as a 'helper' tries to convert his social-media-democratization project into a much more elaborate creation that fails all the author's requirements. This is where the other person would fork and be done with it: seems rude to try and shake the original dev from his fundamental motivations with the project. Question. If the original person is so niche that they'll create something original but unhelpful to most people, and the interloper is far more in tune with popular demand and will create something that is meh but popular, is forking the project and making two projects, the niche one and the meh popular one, bad? If this is done and it upsets the original dev, who sees his vision desecrated by a garbage knock-off, and he quits and goes and jumps off a cliff, is THAT bad? The latter is an extreme, but I'm reminded of so many stories from history and media along these lines. The most popular comic strip in history is named 'Peanuts', and was always the work of one man, Charles Schulz. Everything about it was him on the page… except the name, which was forced on him by the syndicate, over his preferred Lil' Folks. Schulz never came to terms with the name Peanuts. He saw it as 'little worthless things, things of little value'. This of course echoed the neuroticism of his very intelligent and fretful characters, forever worrying about their own value, and so lampshading that in the title of the strip has probably helped its popularity, as it's a guide to the kind of humor within. Let's postulate that Schulz was able to use Lil' Folks, or even 'these are awesome self-actualized people worthy of love and respect, just like me the cartoonist', and let's imagine that he could do this and totally nerf the adoption of the strip, allowing the cartoonist's needs to intrude on the art. Should he have? What's more important, his ownership of the project, or what it could become?