Democracy as we see today is vulnerable to manipulation by "mass migration". I saw many good open-source projects being hurt by "new fancy trends" to the point where solid old developers left the project and it was taken over by the "progress is achieved by enforcing changes"^TM* folks simply removing or breaking stuff that has been there for years and worked well.
In all Apache projects, decisions are made a democratic vote by members of the PPMC (Podling Project Management Committee): +1 = in favor, -1 = opposed, 0 = no opinion. Normally votes have some hysteresis to avoid wild changes; normally 3 more +1 votes than -1 votes are required to get a change through. So it is basically a democratic but one that requires close to unanimous agreed.
Hmm... actually I just checked. That is not true for code modifications as we are talking about here. One -1 vote is a veto and blocks the code change: "A -1 vote by a qualified voter stops a code-modification proposal in its tracks. This constitutes a veto, and it cannot be overruled nor overridden by anyone." https://www.apache.org/foundation/voting.html . We have not been following that rule.
I would probably vote -1 on most code modifications that do not clearly benefit the community or that cause excessive turbulence.
