I have finally reconciled it, the disconnect is between the leadership of open source, or the most vocal leadership, and the people who actually do the work, many of whom are moonlighting commercial developers, who like their jobs, and also like to do pro bono work. I wish I had figured that out earlier. We're not as different as some would have you think. An open source project can only work if there's trust in a single leader, and if the leader stays with it. From that place, there's delegation, trust is distributed, but the source of trust must be identifiable.
Someone's got to make the decisions, the arguing stops, movement happens.
Otherwise there's fragmentation, and lots of unhappy people. This is exactly how it works in commercial projects. Yesterday I read a story on Lotus. Com that reviewed Eric Raymond's Cathedral and the Bazaar, and said that his theories about management of open source projects are contradicted by actual practice in real-world open source projects. According to the Lotus article, there are no differences between the way open source projects are managed and any other kind of software project.