This whole it used to be different thing is looking back with rose tinted glasses. It’s always been the case that project maintainers were able to make choices that the community didn’t necessarily agree with, corporate backed contributors or not, and it’s still a possibility to fork and try to prove out that the other stance is better.
Nobody is being forced out of the community, you can fork and not adopt the changes if you want. Thats the real point of free software, that you have the freedom to make that choice. The whole point of free software was never that the direction of the software should be free from corporate control in some way, the maintainers of a project have always had the authority to make decisions about their own project, whether individual or corporate or a mix.
The point of freedom in software is certainly that I can create my own fork. And individual projects a maintainer can certainly do what he wants. But it is still worrying if in community projects such as Debian when decisions that come with a cost to some part of the community are pushed through without full consensus. It would be certainly not the first time. systemd was similar and for similar reasons (commercial interests by some key stakeholders), and I would argue that Debian did suffer a lot from how badly this was handled. I do not think the community ever got as healthy and vibrant as it was before this. So it t would be sad if this continues.
...it is still worrying if in community projects such as Debian when decisions that come with a cost to some part of the community are pushed through without full consensus.
What are some concrete cases you can point to where a decision was made with full consensus? Literally everyone agreed? All the users?
I'm not sure many projects have ever been run that way. I'm sure we've all heard of the Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDfL). I'm sure Linus has made an executive decision once in a while.
> pushed through without full consensus
Requiring full consensus for decisions is a great way to make no decisions.
> are pushed through without full consensus
You describe it that way, but that's not how the world in general works in practice. You do things based on majority.
No, this is not how you do things in a functioning community. You do things based on societal contracts that also protect the interests of minorities.
I cannot fathom using the rest of my Saturday attempting to break down the level of spin you’re trying to play at here.
> systemd was similar and for similar reasons (commercial interests by some key stakeholders)
False claims don't really make the claims about the evils of Rust more believable.