[ultramancool]

I still don't quite get it - meritocracy should invite all to participate and have their contributions considered equally, that's what open source development in this style is about. To say it's not something we should strive for seems ridiculous.

[jordigh]

It's a long article, and judging by the timestamps, you had less than five minutes to read it. Did you really read it in less than five minutes?

I suppose I need to give my slightly inaccurate summary: trying to judge people just based upon their contributions ends up only benefiting the elite who had unfair advantages to begin with, and intentionally silences any effort to compensate people who have inherent social disadvantages.

But the actual article, which I have my doubts you've read, explains this better.

[ultramancool]

> It's a long article, and by the timestamps, you had less than five minutes to read it. Did you really read it in less than five minutes?

Sorry, I had read it before. I just didn't really get an opportunity to discuss it.

> I suppose I need to give my slightly inaccurate summary: trying to judge people just based upon their contributions ends up only benefiting the elite who had unfair advantages to get those advantages, and intentionally silences any effort to compensate people who have inherent social disadvantages.

I'm not saying perfect meritocracy is something we have, but it's something we should strive for and act under at least. We shouldn't over or undervalue contributions just because someone is a certain race/gender/etc in my opinion. It's patronizing and to do so seems only to contribute to the problem further.

[jordigh]

I think meritocracy is one of those things that seems well-intentioned like "separate but equal" or "don't ask don't tell" which sound like a good thing but in fact make things worse. It tries to fix a problem by ignoring it. You can't fix social disadvantages by pretending they don't exist. They exist for everything we do, including writing code.

[ultramancool]

> You can't fix social disadvantages by pretending they don't exist.

The goal of an open source project should not be to fix social disadvantages but to produce the best possible product. They do this best via meritocracy, accepting contributions happily from anyone and choosing the best of them, not by rewarding or punishing people for things which they cannot change. Doing so makes the resulting product worse as you're not getting the best code from the best people, but instead discriminating on other factors unrelated to your end goal.

Is it really "racist" or "sexist" to say this? Is it not the truth?

EDIT: Added some wording to clarify.

[icebraining]

The goal of an open source project should not be to fix social disadvantages but to produce the best possible product.

Why? Lots of open source projects have social goals; for example, there's the Debian Social Contract, the Mozilla Manifesto, and Ubuntu is itself named after an humanitarian philosophy. These goals often override technical quality: Debian will rather ship a more buggy and incomplete FOSS software than one which doesn't comply with the Social Contract.

[ultramancool]

These are some hilariously bad examples. Every Debian user I know adds repositories which violate the social contract, for proprietary drivers, codecs, etc. Ubuntu, while it's named after a humanitarian concept removed this for this very reason: it goes against making the best product possible. I'd argue that most people prefer an OS without said social restrictions and I think Ubuntu is evidence of it rather than evidence against it. That said, most of the restrictions in the things you've listed are technical or legal in nature and _do_ actually have to do with the resulting product rather than unrelated social disadvantages. The Debian social contract simply states "no discrimination" which is certainly in line with meritocracy in my view of it at least.

To answer why: because people want quality software and political agendas are a niche at best. There are much better places to address such things.

[blacksmith_tb]

Well, yes and no. Imagine the opposite situation, where ImaginaryDB is revealed to have made a sweeping genocide possible. I doubt there would be an instant rush to switch DBs, but over time, I would bet many people would use something else. I would like to think that ethics are a part of every human endeavor (we're not quite there yet, unfortunately).

[ultramancool]

> where ImaginaryDB is revealed to have made a sweeping genocide possible.

Freedom 0 according to the FSF is the freedom to use the software for any purpose (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html). Genocide included. I don't see why that would make anyone switch unless the authors publicly said "yes, we support this genocide".

Software is a tool, plain and simple. A better example right now would be Tor or Bitcoin. People aren't flocking away from those for their use in crimes...

[davidw]

"Separate but equal" was anything but well-intentioned.

[jordigh]

But not overtly so. It seems ill-intentioned to some of us today, but consider the people who were in favour of it:

"We are not mistreating them! We are treating them equally. We are keeping the races separate because [whatever reason], but nobody is being mistreated. We are being well-intentioned and everyone can still have equality."

The people who believed and supported separate-but-equal were genuinely thinking they were well-intentioned. They thought it was a good and necessary thing.

[Lawtonfogle]

>The people who believed and supported separate-but-equal were genuinely thinking they were well-intentioned.

Many still do about a small subset of life. Separate bathrooms, separate living quarters, separate locker rooms, etc.

[jazzyk]

She obviously was not socially disadvantaged (as many people in inner cities, etc are), since she had a decent paying developer position at GitHub.

Perhaps, just perhaps...instead of spending time dealing with the rug, she could have brushed up on her coding skills (since someone else had to fix her coding defects for her)?

Overcoming social disadvantage requires some work, you know.

[jordigh]

> She obviously was not socially disadvantaged (as many people in inner cities, etc are), since she had a decent paying developer position at GitHub.

She might not be socially disadvantaged with respect to inner city dwellers, but she's still socially disadvantaged with respect to men.

Please don't make me reiterate all of the things that women have to put up with and men don't, especially in tech. Just because she got a job does not mean that we've solved patriarchy.

[jazzyk]

She got a well-paying development job despite apparently being incompetent.

On what planet is this a "disadvantage"?

[pervycreeper]

I think a lot of people are opposed to sexism or racism precisely because they undermine meritocracy. If you take away fairness or meritocracy as a goal, you are left with chauvinism, supremacy, and tribalism masquerading as their opposites.