

It is democratic. You have a right to all information, the right to error, the right to skepticism, and the right to protest in all nonviolent forms aka the right to offend others.
In this regime of rights, the right to skepticism is the fundamental. You have a right to think for yourself. Authoritarianism is the opposite. Trust is its fulcrum and individual thought, belief, and access to information are not rights of individuals.
You cannot have democracy and citizens without outlets of free expression of all types. There is no way to know if some group is in collusion or spreading misinformation for various purposes. Having the right to anonymously express and check concerns in the public commons is absolutely critical to democracy. Any attempt to remove it is an attack on skepticism, the fundamental cornerstone of democracy that if removed causes total collapse.











Complex social hierarchy is a super important aspect to account for too. In the proprietary software realm, you infer confidence in the accumulated wealth hierarchy. In FOSS the hierarchy is not wealth, but reputation like in academia or the film industry. If some company in Oman makes some really great proprietary app, are you going to build your European startup over top of it? Likewise, if in FOSS someone with no reputation makes some killer app, the first question to ask is whether this is going to anchor or support a stellar reputation. Maybe they are just showing off skills to land a job. If that is the case, they are just like startups that are only looking to get bought up quickly by some bigger fish. We are all conditioned to think in terms of horded wealth as the only form of hierarchy, but that is primitive. If all the wealth was gone, humans are still fundamentally complex social animals, and will always establish a complex hierarchy. This is one of the spaces where it is different.