Democracy is pretty decent, but comes with some big flaws: tyranny of the minority, enormous amounts of back-and-forth to get anything done, big egos at any level can stop progress.
Debian is the very example of it.
Case in point: other distros forced the usr migration and very few problems were had. Debian put the idea through a committee, of course a minority wanted to keep the old behaviour so Debian decided to support both, guess what, supporting both means having two problems now.
> Democracy is pretty decent, but comes with some big flaws
I'd argue you are overstretching one example of one broken system to a whole class of systems. We can reframe these big egos as people who do not believe in democracy, but great believers in feudalism. (Though I do not know all the details what is going on in Debian, may be I misunderstand the affair, and I don't want to mark some specific people as anti-democrats, but I don't know how to aviod it, sorry).
We see how individual developers say "get off my lawn". The social dynamics of a collective decision making doesn't mean for them a thing. Any democracy needs a legitimate way to reach consensus. And everyone needs to conform to a consensus. Legitimacy of procedures must be enough for everyone to believe in the consensus or at least to believe in their obligation to conform. And the more power someone have, the more his obligations to conform are.
I mean, if I'm a regular voter without any special powers to resist consensus, then I cannot brake the consensus, I cannot stop system from working without resorting to really destructive and antisocial behavior. But if I was a president, I would have power, I could resist. But if I did then it would be not a democracy but an autocracy. If I was something in between a voter and a president, then the situation would be something in between, though probably the president may interfere with my plans, use their powers to stop me ruining the system.
In Debian it seems every developer maintaining something important enough have powers to resist any consensus reached. And moreover there are some who actually use their power to resist. And the system as a whole doesn't treat such behavior as them undermining the system and may be undermining the very idea of democracy. I'd say that Debian is playing democracy but didn't invested enough into building a mythology of a democracy, into making people believe in a divine right of democratic procedures to rule them all.
Though from other hand, it may be not a bug, but a feature of a system, because it pays to people by handling them some power, I believe it helps them to not burn out too fast. It charges the community with struggles and a constant fight, it provokes people-centered procedures, not rule-centered.
How much of Python's success is down to the BDFL(-delegate) approach of governance? It seems a lot of projects have adopted it and Python's PEP system for managing new features. I wonder if Debian could use a similar sort of elected presidential system.
I am of the opinion that BDFL style governance is best in software. In the real world the problem is a bit more hairy, but if you have an issue with a tyrant in open source, you can just fork the project.
A BDFL solves the bureaucracy problem (they mandate, everybody implements) and the big ego problem (the biggest ego is at the top by definition). Also BDFL can have vision, something a committee will never have.
In my humble opinion, people like Torvalds and Jobs are the secret to wildly successful software.
The trick with BDFL is, of course, lucking into a suitably B BD, and hanging onto them for as much L as possible.
And benevolence is not an attribute that can be passed to one's successor.
Torvalds and Jobs have done well, but are examples of survivorship bias. What about all the software projects helmed by autocratic douchebag dictators which never went anywhere because they were unable to attract enough contributors to feed the dictator's ego to the point where the community became self-sustaining?
Debian's been going longer than a lot of other software projects, and kept going after the initial founder(s) left the project. The process is messy, sure, but it sure seems sustainable so far.
Precisely. Everyone adores a caring and benevolent dictator. The problem is that the sort of personality traits that inspire someone to pursue a position of power make it overwhelmingly likely that your dictator will be malevolent rather than benevolent. There's a reason that examples of effective BDFLs arise from cases where the dictator was in place before the project became popular.
The other problem is the continuity of leadership. Despite its flaws, one of the strengths of democracy is that the code paths for the transition of power are explicit and regularly exercised. The only reason that anybody has any faith in any potential replacement for Torvalds is that, presumably, Torvalds will hand-pick his inevitable successor. But the successor's inevitable successor will have none of the same legitimacy, and by that time (be it decades from now) I expect the project to transition away from a BDFL model out of necessity.
I find the role based FreeBSD core team approach more adapted to projects such as Debian. They also started with BDLF and then moved on to the core team approach. That's several BDFLs, every one of them with different responsibilities. It's 9 people in the case of FreeBSD. They've tried it with 20 people and then scaled back to 9:
"Deadwood and apathy in the 20-member core team lead to creating bylaws that set up a 9-member elected core team
First elected core team in 2000 with few carryovers from old core team" [1]
It should also be an odd number if they vote, so that there won't be a tie in votes. The same approach is used in kendo and other Japanese martial arts examinations, the number of examinators is always an odd number.
This also solves the "what if the BDFL is hit by a bus" problem: another member is appointed.
I can't deny Python's success, but I wouldn't hold it up paragon of change management, either. 13+ years after the release of Python 3 and 2+ years after 2.7's EOL, I'm still dealing with Python dependencies that don't work on Python 3 because maintainers preferred to pretend that Python 3 wasn't happening and that Python 2.7 would be around forever.
It's confusing as heck trying to figure out what I should even expect to work, because some authors treat it as obvious that their code will work on both Python 2 and Python 3, while other authors treat it as obvious that they still only support Python 2.
I've had a lot less trouble with merged /usr. I guess it's not a fair comparison, but it does suggest to me that there are more important factors at play.
Guido van Rossum openly admits the move from 2 to 3 was a bit of a disaster. I think some of the decisions made since then have been more conservative in a bid to avoid such damage again. And talk of a Python 4 is for the most part academic.
It sounds like the package authors sticking with Python 2 that you're dealing with are just stubborn beyond belief. The rest of the world has moved on whether they agreed with the changes in Python 3 or not. Hopefully if the packages are useful enough to others and the licence allows it, people will fork them and make them work with 3.
>It's confusing as heck trying to figure out what I should even expect to work, because some authors treat it as obvious that their code will work on both Python 2 and Python 3, while other authors treat it as obvious that they still only support Python 2.
I believe grand majority of packages already dropped 2.7 from latest releases, given that it's officially dead for over two years.
The Debian Project Leader election voting is going on right now, but the powers they have under the constitution mean the position is mostly a figurehead/administrator. Governance is more distributed in Debian; there is the technical committee to resolve technical disputes, the release team, the archive admin team and other teams.
I mean, C++ is designed by committee, and it's hard to deny that it's been pretty successful too, regardless of what people's opinions on the language are. Both styles have flaws, but both can be adequate if you put in the right incentives and the right people.
I'm not sure the success of C++ has as much to do with the C++ committee as the fact that there were few alternatives competing in the same space until the past decade.
I didn't say it's due to the committee, I just said it succeeded and had a committee. Python succeeded and had a BDFL, but I wouldn't say it's due to that either - lots of projects pull off the latter but not the former.
this is a trendy thing too, very often minorities who felt ignored, are now pushing to get more because of the tiranny of the majority had flaws (but to me is mostly unavoidable due to the natural economies of scale it grants).
I don't know how one can design a social system where you balance both in the right way.
> the tiranny of the majority had flaws (but to me is mostly unavoidable due to the natural economies of scale it grants).
In a different context, this is a source of frustration for me as a (partially) blind person advocating accessibility for blind people. The world is designed around the assumption, correct for most people, that people have the high-bandwidth, low-latency sense of sight. And that does lead to the most effective interface for most people. That assumption is so thoroughly baked into everything that I sometimes think it might have been better if, through some kind of eugenics, I and people like me (blind from birth) had never been born at all, so the world could go on with that assumption (as it mostly does anyway) without leaving us out. I know eugenics is a taboo idea though, and it has its own problems.
First of all I think Eugenics would/will quickly lead to something akin to runaway selection: people will make increasingly absurd decisions mainly driven by status markers / perceptual drift and the human race will breed itself into some mad corner. So I don't believe Eugenics is ever going to do what even its most ardent supporters imagine.
Second of all the human race does not have some over-arching goals we need to meet like a business. It is or should be like a club run for the benefit of the members: let's create good conditions for people. We can tolerate a bit of complexity and diversity.
> Second of all the human race does not have some over-arching goals we need to meet like a business. It is or should be like a club run for the benefit of the members: let's create good conditions for people. We can tolerate a bit of complexity and diversity.
Individuals and groups (including businesses) do have goals though, and it seems natural that some of them feel that they're being thwarted in their pursuit of those goals by expectations that they accommodate every little minority (including the one to which I belong). The backlash against legislation requiring accessibility, for example, is real, as seen in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30726471
"Poor businesses forced to build ramps and make their websites screenreader-accessible" seems a distinctly weird take to me.
If we're no longer taking even the slightest bit of care towards looking after our fellow Man then it's not a world worth living to me.
EDIT: It's also not just a "tiny minority", about 13% of the world's population have serious vision impairment. Making streets, businesses, services, products accessible is the very least we can do. It's scary that someone who suffers from this himself would chalk it off as inefficiency and waste.
It's somehow similar to the way so many of us expect actually evil people to somehow come with horns or other evil-indicating visual accessories. The reality is that evil people wear suits, and jeans, and shorts and hats and look just like the non-evil people.
So it is with "reasonable". The fact that someone can phrase their objections to accessibility that doesn't make them immediately sound like a prejudiced ignorant lunatic doesn't actually mean that they are not a prejudiced ignorant lunatic (it doesn't mean that they are either, but you should remain suspicious).
For myself, I had a revelation about such matters when my daughter had major hip surgery (twice). While normally a fully mobile and athletic person, she had to spend several weeks (twice) with a wheelchair. Suddenly it became clear that the accomodations we have made in this direction are not just for people born with disabilities that prevent them from walking: any one of us could find ourselves, either temporarily or permanently, benefitting from ramps and door openers and curb cuts etc.
I am absolutely certain that the same is also true of accomodations made in the direction of visual impairment, hearing impairment and just about any other condition that deviates from some (often hypothetical) state of "full functionality".
Please, protect yourself from the backlash from these "seemingly reasonable" people. They are ignorant, selfish and of limited scope in their thinking. You deserve better.
I saw a bit of rhetoric a while back about how it's not "disabled people and non-disabled people", it's really "disabled people and not-currently-disabled people."
Between spending several months on crutches ten-ish years ago and helping care for several elderly relatives, I'm a believer.
Then we should start with the assumption that they're not, right? I'm guessing that starting out by assuming the worst in others is one thing that contributes to the current polarization in US politics.
> Please, protect yourself from the backlash from these "seemingly reasonable" people.
What specifically do you advise that I do here? I don't want to just ignore challenges to the idea that accessibility should be a requirement. If I pay attention to these people and put in the effort to understand why they think as they do, then I can become a more effective advocate, or possibly even revise my position. Yes, the latter may lead me to question whether I should even exist, but it seems to me that a healthy mind should be able to dispassionately contemplate hypotheticals that even threaten oneself.
I think that empathy is something we should all try to cultivate more of, and I try to do this myself (much to the derisive contempt of some people who do indeed think you should just assume the worst based on the smallest possible evidence).
However, while we definitely need more empathy, the world is also full of stupidity, and there's a point in everything where you need to be able to stop putting your energy into fighting the stupid. There's a point where you have to say "no, wait, these people are not actually arguing in good faith, i've explained to them over and over again why they are wrong, why the evidence of the last N years shows them to be wrong, and they have no answer to this, and just keep repeating the same falsehoods. I'm done".
Now, if you're not at that point with the people you engage with about this, great, keep aiming for empathy and understanding. But if you are, move on.
There's a company I collaborated with once who had an epiphany when they realized they had been putting way too much energy into trying to prevent people ripping off their software. They changed direction and focused on ignoring the people who did that, and instead tried to provide the best possible customer service and support they could to people who had paid them. Things got better for everyone. I think there's a general lesson here about where best to direct one's energies.
People are not reasonable. They simply have their reasonable moments. If someone is angry because someone else asked for something then I think it's pretty obvious they're not in reasonable-mode.
You need to realize we are currently implementing eugenics, we just don't know what our goals are.
There's two types of eugenics, positive and negative, based on the root of postulate. A positive eugenics program selects *for* specific qualities like hair color. Negative eugenics selects *against* deleterious phenotypes.
You still need to exercise caution. For example, selecting against depression may be long term bad because the real thing we need to do is reform society to reduce depression. But there are some things, like being born with a disability, that have obvious impact outside of a functioning society that it seems reasonable to select against them.
W.r.t. the parent comment to yours, I'm conflicted; I've spoken to people and seen how many issues they have getting accomodation. If people were forced to care, making interfaces for blind people would be pretty easy. But many people refuse to care.
The idea of genetic drift due to lack of selective pressure has been studied (recently, and in a way not connected to racism) and was pretty grim. Unfortunately due to the connotations eugenics typically carries it has remained poorly investigated.
> the human race will breed itself into some mad corner
Bit of a tangent, but I think sexual reproduction helps to avoid this. Picture a set of points (people) in Euclidean space. Pick any two, "a" and "b", at random. Add a new point "c" at the midpoint. Unless the overall shape of this swarm is highly nonconvex, then this point "c" is going to be more in the "interior". If we formalized things a little more, we could prove that this operation is a contraction. The Fixed Point Theorem would apply, &etc.
So, once your set has reached some convex shape, then there's a balance between these two forces: The contracting force of sexual reproduction, and the expanding force of random mutation.
There's also selection of course. I tacitly assume there isn't much more of that happening right now? I could be wrong though; there may be some (strong?) selection against education...
Interestingly, it's these educated who I assume would "benefit" from a eugenics regime. But, one bad meme, and the whole thing goes bad...
You could just have the government mandate a test, and any embryo that has markers (genetic or otherwise) of a chronic debilitating condition is not allowed to be brought to term. If parents do choose this, the kid will fall outside of the healthcare system for its condition and parents will have to foot the entire ongoing bill.
Eugenics does not automatically mean we all customize our embryos to be 2m tall geniuses with patterned body hair.
More of an aside, but I’ve always wondered where humans would end up if we did do unbridled genetic engineering. Is 2m the ideal height? 1.80m? 2.40m? What would we discover is the optimal IQ? Etc.
Is 2m the ideal height? 1.80m? 2.40m? What would we discover is the optimal IQ? Etc.
I think Brave New World treats this question pretty well. We'd probably discover that there is no 'optimal' height or IQ and we'd still need the whole span of "Big Dumb Brutes" to hyper-geniuses. The secret is convince everybody the IQ/physique they've been assigned is the 'actual' optimal and they're the lucky ones that everybody else should envy.
One thing to keep in mind is that eyesight is a continuum between better than 20/20 to completely blind like you.
That means that without going the only-the-perfect-survive route, there are always going to be issues with how the world operates. For any given human problem, it's probably rare that it's optimized for even half the population.
Doesn't help you, being on the extreme of the eyesight problem, but the fact that we need to accommodate blind people also helps a bunch for people with vision issues and (commonly imperfect) correction.
So while you can consider yourself to be in the small percentage of completely blind people, you can also consider yourself to be in the majority of people with vision issues. Should we have avoided all of them in this world?
And that's wherein lies the issue with eugenics or any sort of artifical selection of our descendants: where is that line?
And just judging by this single comment, you are at least capable of eloquent, reasonable discussion, which is probably untrue for at least half the population.
Correct. Legally blind, meaning, for example, that I can't drive, but with enough sight to read text up close if it's large enough. Edit to add: I do increasingly depend on a screen reader, though not yet for my actual programming work.
ETA 2: Sorry for the confusion in the original comment. I've become wary of terms like "visually impaired", because they wreak of over-sensitivity and political correctness. But there's also something to be said for accurately and clearly communicating the actual condition.
Not only is that impractical (how can you reliably filter blindness before birth? I suppose you could test babies eyesight at birth and kill them if they're blind?), but what about the people who get blind during their lives? They are the vast majority of cases of blindness!
It seems very odd to propose that the solution to a problem is to liquidate all people who suffer from that problem.
My first experience with someone in your position was Geordi LaForge. I found it so inspiring how he overcame - though technology - his blindness and how his innovation became central to fulfilling his craft's mission and often securing the safety of its crew. I often wondered what would have become of him had he been born in an earlier age, without the technology to provide him with an alternative high-bandwidth, low-latency sense.
I am blessed that I have all my senses and so do my children, but I absolutely believe that the 9999 other traits that you have to share should not be lost just because of a single non-optimal trait.
> My first experience with someone in your position was Geordi LaForge. I found it so inspiring [...]
To be clear, that's a fictional character in a fictional future that may or may not ever come. Sure, we can use assistive technology, e.g. screen readers, to enable us to work. But with our current technology, that requires cooperation from developers of platforms, applications, websites, etc., and as I said in another comment, advocating for that sometimes seems futile. We do sometimes make progress though.
> I absolutely believe that the 9999 other traits that you have to share should not be lost just because of a single non-optimal trait.
Yes, Roddenberry used his fictional future to show us what our future could be. That was the point that I was trying to make without being too explicit - that could in fact be our future. If we choose it.
Maybe I'm succumbing to the cynical zeitgeist, but I figure the future will be primarily whatever the wealthy minority wants. If that's so, then maybe the best hope for people like me is a future like the one portrayed in the opening of Ready Player Two (generally not a very good book), where a VR-obsessed multi-billionaire funds work on neural interfaces, starting with implants for disabled people and culminating in the OASIS Neural Interface headset. Yes, it would feel wrong to be used as a means to an end, but it would answer the question of how a world-dominating VR as depicted in those books could be made accessible.
There a lot of different biases in the world of tech, sightedness is just one of them.
Are there any operating systems written from or computers built from a blind perspective, or are the blind just using the accessibility features of sighted operating systems?
> Are there any operating systems written from or computers built from a blind perspective
Yes, but they struggle to keep up with the mainstream, especially considering the runaway complexity of the web. The one notable open-source example is Emacspeak [1]. The rest, as far as I know, have been proprietary and often overpriced products.
Just want to encourage you to keep pointing to accessibility problems loud and clear. While CSS complexity was mostly driven by ads, ecommerce, and porn, there are people who tried hard to do the right thing on the web (Paciello Group, W3C's WCAG, etc.), thereby also contributing to unwarranted complexity, who could benefit from feedback. And I don't have to tell you, but if you think you're not affected because you're young, sight/focussing problems kick in at about the age of 50.
"Debian took a more incremental approach, in part because it strives not to make wholesale changes to users' systems like those required by a flag-day upgrade to a merged /usr. In 2016, the ability to voluntarily switch to that scheme was added, then some attempts were made for newer versions of the distribution to be installed with a merged /usr by default. [...] The location of some files was being resolved at build time to point into /usr/bin (for example), but those files only existed in /bin on the non-merged systems."
The fact that the committee took a decision that the core package manager can't support is baffling to me.
The committee took a decision that the package manager /doesn't/ support.
If I've learned one thing, it's that there's very little that software can't be made to do. Whether it should is an entirely valid question, and hopefully figured out before assessing the "could" aspect.
> The fact that the committee took a decision that the core package manager can't support is baffling to me.
Why? Presumably the committee would be thereby deciding to drive development of the package manager toward whatever is required to support the high-level goal.
From a user perspective the high level problem would be merged directories. Which dpkg apparently already supports. Just not the way the committee wants it done.
> deciding to drive development of the package manager
Which is the hilarious part: No one seems to be working on it. The package maintainer for dpkg isn't required to it as long as he accepts reasonable patches, but only half finished patches (that identify themselves as such) are coming in when the reported issues are not outright ignored. Seems liked Debian suffers from the same issue every open source projects suffers from: A bunch of lazy and entitled as fuck users insisting on features without putting any effort in themselves.
Linux development in the present era is very heavily driven by Red Hat's needs and desires, and I don't think they have this problem because they don't support upgrading from one release to the next using the package manager - you have to reboot into the installer and do a kind of reinstall in place. So they can just require that all packages only have files in the non-symlinked directories after the flag day. Debian is different - you have to use the package manager to upgrade, which means you're going to be running with a mix of new and old packages at least for a while.
Red Hat is not only RHEL. Red Hat's Fedora supports distro upgrades and they didn't have much issues pulling it off. I was using Arch Linux when the merge happened and it was a non-event.
It doesn't seem too difficult to support; what are the edge cases?
Who owns a file in a path that includes a 'well known symlink dir'?
So maintain a list of well known symlink dirs. When checking a file path against the database, the normalization step should check if the known symlink dir is any point of the path; if it is the redirect should be resolved to the well known target instead.
E.G. owns('/bin/bash') ... the path mutates to '/usr/bin/bash' because the location '/bin/' is already known to really be '/usr/bin/'.
You're spreading misinformation too: based on the article the dpkg maintainer is trying his hardest to obstruct fixes and implementation of the feature despite the voting and consensus.
> Democracy is pretty decent, but comes with some big flaws: tyranny of the minority, enormous amounts of back-and-forth to get anything done, big egos at any level can stop progress.
The problem is not in democracy itself as a concept. In both the open-source world and in society itself, the problems arise only when the demos (the population) either grow disinterested in democracy or is small in numbers.
As for "tyranny of the minority" - I hope to never see that phrase again. Protections for minorities in democracies exist for a very good reason. In the case of projects such as Debian to reduce the chance of solo maintainers quitting over frustration about being overruled, in democracies to prevent atrocities and hold up human rights for vulnerable people (e.g. disabled).
> As for "tyranny of the minority" - I hope to never see that phrase again. Protections for minorities in democracies exist for a very good reason.
There is plenty of evidence for the theory proposed by Taleb[0] on this one, he wrote:
"It suffices for an intransigent minority – a certain type of intransigent minorities – to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences."
There is the political/sociological meaning of the word "minority" that you seem to refer to, and there is the linguistic/logical/mathematical meaning (those who are not in majority or a small group).
I am pretty sure the use in the phrase you object to is of the latter form.
>> As for "tyranny of the minority" - I hope to never see that phrase again. Protections for minorities in democracies exist for a very good reason.
I digress, but how are these protections an inherent feature of democracies. Even in a democracy (most democracies are representation democracies) people can vote for policies which may discriminate against people. This would be again democracy in action.
In a liberal democracy, it is understood that the will of the majority is not the only thing that matters.
For example, having the majority vote to strip a minority from their religious freedoms is not OK.
The irony is the good parts of "democracy" aren't actually the democratic bits at all, but rather a basic respect for civil liberties (a.k.a. natural laws) which are subject to neither democratic votes nor authoritarian decrees. The key is not to lose sight of the fact that what the majority wills is not always right.
This is why attempts to impose democracy from outside tend to fail. Giving people the vote doesn't automatically lead to respect for their fellow citizens' civil liberties, which is much more fundamental.
I don't compare you with a nazi, but you should understand that minority's can take over a country, that's what the nazis did but also the communists in romanov-russia...china is more complicated. It's something completely different, but maybe "nazi" is a red flag for you in comments...because not comfy.
EDIT: And more actual, the Taliban's in Afghanistan, an absolute minority but the one with weapons, training, connections to local "war/land"-lords and the will to take over the country.
Or the Alawites in Syria, or the Europeans in 18th century North America, or the Mongols, or a hundred other examples. There's a line somewhere between less-violent "minorities taking over a country" and more violent Mongol-like "taking over", but I would say that the situation of a minority group seizing power is not significantly less common than of a majority group seizing power.
Godwin's law is not exactly a law, but an observation. Your comment is justified, because the current zietgeist is "majority wrong and minority right" and your comment is highlighting the dangers of such a process.
If you define majority as 50%+1, and minority as 50%-1, almost all democracies in the world have the minority in the power (unless they get 100% turn out rate with all votes contributing to parliamentary seats). Winning 60% of votes with a turn out of 70% voters is only 42% of the population.
Nah, people staying home on polling day doesn't stop them from being part of the majority opinion. If an option gets 60% of the vote, and there are no shenanigans going on, then that option is almost certainly the choice of the majority.
That's a pretty flexible definition of "choice" ;)
Does this also hold if the vote went 51% to 49% (in dual party system)?
Democracy is there to allow us to express a preference. Not voting is exactly that, a preference to not vote, and reasons are certainly various (including the one you mention of supporting the likely winner).
> That's a pretty flexible definition of "choice" ;)
If you choose not to vote, you're putting endorsement toward what everyone else does. If nothing particularly weird or bad is going on, the people not voting should be similar to the people voting.
And you can pretend I said "preference" if you don't like the word choice. Doesn't change my argument.
> Does this also hold if the vote went 51% to 49% (in dual party system)?
No, statistically that's too close. But when you get 60% of a 70% turnout, to reverse that the rest of the population would have prefer to vote about 3:1 in the opposite direction. That's not likely.
>However, despite waging a campaign of terror against their opponents, the Nazis only tallied 43.9 percent of the vote on their own, well short of a majority to govern alone.
One problem that the Weimar Republic suffered from is that there were too many small parties. Absorbing them is easy if you are the trump of the 30s and are willing to use violence behind the scenes to intimidate anyone who opposes you. Also, it helps to have connections with people who hate democracy in important political positions.
on the other side, debian is one of the most stable platforms, more than even commercial ones (binary compatible centos is just a blink in the lifetime of debian for example :D) .
just because people care about the technology...
and upgrading is important for small business with less money. and this shows how hard it is to achive an good upgrade path.
The reasonable explanation for that is that in a monarchy, ostensibly all bodies are working towards common goal (as dictated at the top). Whereas in a democracy, in many cases there exist bodies with equal power yet conflicting interests.
Monarchies seem to work well in cases where "the top" has interests that align with the interests of the subjects, and is well-informed. Jordan seems to be a great example. Yet history is full of examples of long-standing monarchy-type organizations where after only a short time of disconnect between the governing and the governed, the entire system fails. A Frenchman could probably provide good examples.
Communism as the rule of "the proletariat" instead of a ruling nobility has created the worst horrors of the 20th century. You may think of monarchy and communism as the same thing "because they are dictatorships", because the frame of reference you are used to is contrasting everything to "democracy", but they really really are not.
Debian is the very example of it.
Case in point: other distros forced the usr migration and very few problems were had. Debian put the idea through a committee, of course a minority wanted to keep the old behaviour so Debian decided to support both, guess what, supporting both means having two problems now.