From Dave Winer’s piece on The theory of Twitter

In open source communities they call the imbalance a benevolent dictatorship. Far from being a perfect democracy some people imagine open source to be, actually a project sinks or swims based on how good the central decision-maker is. Again, people complain about the A-list, but that’s okay, work gets done over the objections.

Well, not all open source projects are dictatorships. Apache, Eclipse, and Subversion are examples of prominent open source projects whose governance model is not a dictatorship.