[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.

[icebraining]

Well, now you know one Debian user that doesn't have repositories in his machine that violate the social contract, and while I'm not a purist, the Social Contract is actually a significant part of why I like and support Debian.

I don't agree with the notion that you can neatly separate "politics" from the rest of your life. Every action that you do which affects others is inherently political, and publicly distributing software is no different. By just following along, one is simply weakly supporting the status quo - which might be fine, but should be consciously chosen nevertheless.

Regarding whether I want worse software because of my political opinions, it's not really relevant what I want; I do consider having social goals as a valid position for an open source / free software project.

[ultramancool]

> By just following along, one is simply weakly supporting the status quo - which might be fine, but should be consciously chosen nevertheless.

I am not supporting the status quo, I am simply supporting the best possible software we can produce. And I don't believe we produce that by rewarding or punishing people based on factors they can't change. This is not a matter of "following along", this is a matter of using the best people to the best of their abilities, regardless of these factors.

[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"?

[jordigh]

She's not evidently incompetent. She apparently wrote some bugs. We all write bugs.

You are a bit too antagonistic and you sound too emotional in your responses. Please be more charitable. I am not able to respond well to such an unfriendly tone.