Leadership is important, but how a leader derives his power differs greatly by context. In the case of a football coach, it's basically positional power - you "

Leadership is important, but how a leader derives his power differs greatly by context. In the case of a football coach, it's basically positional power - you "take it or leave it", because as a subordinate, you can't change it. The military, corporations, and other forms of hierarchical organizations operate this way. As you alluded to, open source leadership is derived by a different sort of power - it's earned. Leaders rise to the top by the respect they earn. In this context, who the top leader is varies, and there's not a clear cut designation of "leadership". What usually tends to happen is that leaders in this "open" context will try to switch to a "positional" context (eg, by issuing a decree that designates titles). Fortunately, we don't see much of that in the open source world and the Rails leadership has shown tremendous vision by focusing on what matters to Rails developers: code. If you take a quick glance across the Rails landscape, the "leaders" are there because of technical excellence; nothing else. DHH will always have a special place in the Rails landscape as the originator, but the true technical leadership has been people like Yehuda Katz, Jeremy Kemper, Josh Peek, etc. (others mentioned in the article). The other wonderful thing about Rails is that it's based on Ruby, and Ruby is anchored by some wise old men whose leadership is second to none. Despite some ugliness here and there, I still feel the Ruby and Rails communities are wonderful communities to participate in and its leadership is in good hands.