[wrycoder]

"Megan Squire is a professor of computer science at Elon University who has published research on both the far right and open source software communities. She says that “the dominant open source culture historically has been one of extreme misogyny, unfounded meritocracy, toxicity and abuse of everyone,” and that Smith is one of those resisting efforts to change that culture."

[piokoch]

I didn't know that Richard Stallman or Eric S. Raymond are abusive, toxic and misogynic meritocrats.

All those people who contribute their free time into development of Linux kernel, Gnome, Tex, Audacity, Gimp, Inkscape, Libre Office to name just a few out of uncountable number of other free software, all the Debian packages maintainers, etc., etc. are such a disgusting people. Shame on them! So good we have Megan who enlightened us.

"Unfounded meritocracy". Seriously? Who makes such people "professors"? How someone who is able to put so many nonsense claims into a single sentence can even be let inside academia?

[cema]

Stallman is, unfortunately.

[bitwize]

> I didn't know that Richard Stallman or Eric S. Raymond are abusive, toxic and misogynic meritocrats.

Sounds like you haven't read Eric Raymond's blog. Or the accounts if how Stallman treated women, or his own political talking points about how he thought pedophilia was okay.

As for Linux, we have documented instances of abuse by that project's leader going back decades. In 2018 he was called out and forced to accept accountability for it. The alternative may have been loss of stewardship of the project.

> "Unfounded meritocracy". Seriously? Who makes such people "professors"?

"Meritocracy" is like "culture fit": a fiction often used to mask discrimination based on race, gender, gender identity, or ethnic background.

[wrycoder]

That happens to be a quote from the article.