Words are important. Diversity is important.
Changing words like "meritocracy" does not improve diversity.
It is the illusion of diversity, a feel-good opportunity for well-intentioned bystanders.
The true intent is for a small group of highly politically motivated people to gain more control.
The governance documents are about control and changing those documents means a shift in control.
The movement we are seeing here opposes meritocracy on political principle, as part of their worldview.
It does not stop there though.
They believe the only answer for "diversity" to put them in charge, beginning with government documents that reflect their radical worldview, see FreeBSD Code of Conduct.
Even if you support diversity, you have to realize these people do not care about diversity or inclusion, they are little authoritarians who want more power to dictate what people say and whose opinion matters more/less based on immutable characteristics.
We cannot allow authoritarians with such warped views of the world to seize control of key open source projects.
When people approached some of the FreeBSD Core Team with their concerns about vague language that could be subject to abuse, they were basically told they were all racist transphobes who weren't welcome to contribute to FreeBSD anyways.
So it was a pretty obvious politically-motivated power-grab.
They are already attempting to control use of language and the foundational view of how open source works, based on their world view that equality is an illusion and only through use of selective discrimination against unpopular groups, as dictated by them, can equality be achieved.
you sound like a conspiracy theorist. it is changing an inappropriate word, not shifting control over the entire company Mozilla. i doubt you care about diversity or improving the quality of the open source project
your arguments are hypberolic in some cases, as changing or clarifying a word or sentence even is not "remake(ing) a software project". and I think the word meritocracy is vague, a overarching word used to describe many things to many people, mozilla should instead simply be more clear about what that means. what is the "playing field", that itself is a metaphor for sports and physical ability I guess. How will the ability of those chosen for participation under this meritocracy be judged
Really? People who interpret 'meritocracy' in a narrow, little known historical context, as being a conspiracy against miniorities, rather than it's currently accepted form, sound like conspiracy theorists.
that is quite the stretch. thinking a word should be updated or clarified does not make me a "conspiracy theorist". What am I conspiring against? people fighting so hard against a simple change to make the sentence more inclusive are just fighting to keep their antiquated system of bias in place
They are proposing removing meritocracy based on their political view that certain classes of people will never be able to participate on a level playing field.
They are the ones advancing a narrative of exclusion, telling individuals in whole swaths that they can never compete in open source projects.
They have no evidence to support this of course, just what they were taught in their sociology classes at uni.
In reality though they are the ones pushing outdated bias.
and yet Mozilla put out a proposal to discuss this, not something people just do for trivial matters. so they clearly feel strongly about it, but this dude can't?
also, there's no need for the ad hominem attack. if he is a conspiracist, it should be easy to point out a more simple explanation.
Exactly! Programmers/Developers brushing this off as, ”well it’s only semantics” seem to forget that our entire industry is predicated on the use of semantics...
These people thing changing the code of our institutions works, specifically by giving them more power, that we can rid our institutions of the worst aspects of human nature: racism, sexism, xenophobia.
We can and should combat those aspects for sure, but we are also giving into another aspect of human nature: unchecked power and control, which will almost certainly lead to abuse. There is also no evidence that this will improve diversity.
It's just to make people feel good and put a few radicals in charge who want to dictate everything.