Hello there,
KatolaZ wrote on 04/08/2015 at 09:36 CEST:
[...]
The free software community is probably one of the last truly
democratic and meritocratic social environments.
While I appreciate your idealism a lot and am happy to hear people still
(or again?) talk like that, I feel the urge to point out two
implications that I, from my personal experience, find problematic:
(1) By leaving the part of making actual money with one's work to a
cabale of "evil proprietary software guys", a free software community
(as I, maybe somewhat unfairly, assume you envision it) will always
remain under the thumb of a disjoint economic elite who - while they
admittedly are imprisoned in their own minds - command the capital to
manipulate the market into perpetuating that very inequality.
Instead, let us point out selling closed software as what it is: a
sleazy money-making scheme that can only be sold as a generally
acceptable modus operandi by means of strategic lobbying, clever
marketing (including state-subsidized market manipulation) and, last
but not least, a decent share of corruption.
In short: Free software is not a some sort of an alternative
"environment" that comforts some psychological needs of its
participants, free software is the only acceptable way of
distributing software, because proprietary software is not an
alternative at all.
(2) The "meritocratic" approach of self-organization unfortunately
tends to converge into counterproductive elitism, not so much by the
ways it operates intrinsically, but due to the interactions with
outside systems, economically and psychologically.
Example #1: Around the 2000's there was a re-surging fad over the
so called "functional programming languages", where GNU-affine
coders for no good reason were indoctrinated to regard everyone
who failed to immediately grasp the immanent superiority of the
functional programming approach as intellectually inferior. This
lead to rather drastic construction errors in important projects
of free software, most notably for me "The Gimp" being equipped
with a Scheme-dialect called "Script-Fu" as a (back then the) sole
and only macro language, inhibiting development of a proper macro
system and making it inaccessible for the vast majority of
potential script authors.
This error has been cumbersomely mitigated by providing Python-Fu
as somewhat of an alternative, but the loss in momentum introduced
by this elitism in the early days is something The Gimp has yet to
recover from today.
Short: A (scientific) meritocracy is vulnerable to (scientific) fads.
Example #2: SystemD. Watch in amazement a software that is
technically and scientifically unreasonable being amalgamated into
a widely adopted industry standard by people who *claim* to have
superior skills and happen to have that claim backed by corporate
funding and clever psychological manipulation. In parallel, they
*define* only such activities a "merit" that help further their
cause. Even if this transformation should happen to result in a
market of development and services that can be called a
meritocracy, it was mere elitism nonetheless
Short: Having a (scientific) meritocracy is not a good thing per se.
Kind regards,
T.
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