Open Source is in fact a democracy. The most general definition of democracy is: Everybody in the group has the same amount of power, which is defined by "shared understanding" how things should be, and usually by having an explicit rule in place that enforces the same amount of power for everyone (in small groups, the rule may be just informal).
In OSS, everybody has the same access to the source code. That's the power from the definition, and the OSS license is the explicit rule.
Because of the explicit rule, if someone goes power hungry on one extreme, the rule guarantees that he will be ousted (via forking the source), and other extreme, if someone is not interested in politics (like someone actually working on the code), they won't get screwed, because they will always have the source code access according to the rule.
People in the past tried it, naively, without the explicit power rule. That was the MIT license. But they got screwed (divided and conquered) by people who wanted power, who wanted to close the source. That's why copyleft (i.e. democracy) was invented. (This actually happened on the metagame level - now the BSD type licenses mostly work because people always can fall back to GPL.)
In OSS, everybody has the same access to the source code. That's the power from the definition, and the OSS license is the explicit rule.
Because of the explicit rule, if someone goes power hungry on one extreme, the rule guarantees that he will be ousted (via forking the source), and other extreme, if someone is not interested in politics (like someone actually working on the code), they won't get screwed, because they will always have the source code access according to the rule.
People in the past tried it, naively, without the explicit power rule. That was the MIT license. But they got screwed (divided and conquered) by people who wanted power, who wanted to close the source. That's why copyleft (i.e. democracy) was invented. (This actually happened on the metagame level - now the BSD type licenses mostly work because people always can fall back to GPL.)