Now, there's no doubt, we're trying out the idea of free source code. It's another fake panacea. Larry Wall, the lead developer of Perl is an O'Reilly employee. So all these bazzaar-like communities have leaders. That's the way software has always worked.
Someone has to make the tough calls.
And the quality and intensity of that person determines the quality of the software. Only as good as a single human being can be. I'd like to get together a meeting of the lead developers of all the major scripting languages and environments to talk about architecture. I see us heading down some major wrong roads. We're going to re-learn some lessons about connections, largely because of the free software thing.