Twitter is a neat illustration of the problem with benevolent dictatorships: they work well, but fail badly. Because they are property — not protocols — they can change hands, and overnight, you get a new, malevolent dictator who wants to retool the system for extraction, rather than collaboration.
Benevolent dictatorships: work well; fail badly
Twitter is the example listed here. But I wonder about benevolent dictatorships in open source. One example: does Linus have a sound succession plan for Linux? (Can such a succession plan even be tested and adjusted?)
