> The question is not who gets to do the decisions but how the team aligns itself and coordinates. ...IMHO it's the other way around, somebody needs to do the

> The question is not who gets to do the decisions but how the team aligns itself and coordinates. ...IMHO it's the other way around, somebody needs to do the difficult and unpopular decisions exactly for those hopefully rare situations where the self-coordination within a team fails (and doing that in a way that doesn't piss off people in the team). In the end, contributors to an open source project are also just a very loosely coupled team. 'Unpopular' decisions are much easier to do in projects that have a universally accepted and respected BDFL (ideally the project founder) than in most 'commercial' teams led by random 'management-caste' peeps.