I touched on this in another comment on another post loosely associated with the "secret Slack" and off-chain happenings surrounding Steem. All of this chaotic nonsense highlights one important fact about Steem: it's centralised and it's private.

Sure, the witnesses themselves have some kind of power in choosing to support a particular version or not, but as I also pointed out elsewhere, as long as there is a financial incentive to "get in line" and collect your profits, most witnesses will never speak out of turn or do anything that jeopardises their profits (because running full nodes is damn expensive).

This whole mess also highlights Ned's noticeable lack of experience running a multi-million dollar company, as well as his immaturity (knee-jerk reactions, poor communication, defensive and highly reactive). Everything has been mismanaged, and if this were a true community-owned project where we got a say in day-to-day operations, Ned and his incompetent cohorts would have been ousted by the community ages ago.

While community initiatives that aim to change Steem are well-intentioned, because STINC owns Steem, change can only go so far and STINC is the gatekeeper: everything goes through them, concensus for such a move would never be achieved amongst all top witnesses. Forking and removing Steemit Inc and Ned's funds will only kill this platform.

One thing that is certain: Steem is not an open source project. It's a privately run for-profit company that will always put its priorities above the community, as we have seen time and time again.