Hello KatolaZ and Rainer,

I thank both of you for your replies and before anything else I would
like to state that I am someone who has accomplished next to no
mentionable contributions to free software at all.

What I do have is lots of project experience and even a little
background in research on project management; in short, I think a lot
about these things, and I can not help myself from diagnosing and
assessing.

Whatever I write is philosophical, and you are free to assign to it no
more value than to the contents of the tabloid press that Rainer has
mentioned.

Rainer Weikusat wrote on 04/08/2015 at 12:57 CEST:
> tilt! <tilt@???> writes:
>> [...]
> [...]
> I nevertheless have to disagree with this somewhat: To a degree,
> everything is a fad and people never intentionally further a bad
> cause. That's why open discussion of ideas is important and open
> discussion of ideas can only happen in an environment where the
> people championing them are not discussed[*]. Otherwise, it degrades
> into a possibly entertaining but ultimatively useless spectacle
> of the kind yellow press and TV companies make money from.
>
> [*] With more than three decades of exprience as everybody's favourite
> punching ball, I claim to know a little about this :-)

One point I was trying to make is, that a meritocracy can add momentum
into a positive as well as into a negative direction. I did not intend
to rule out that it can add momentum into a positive direction.

I still feel uneasy about the concept of a meritocracy, but maybe I
should be a bit more specific:

Using the amount of contributions as a metric that decides over the
influence an individual can exert in future decision-making of a project
means discarding the fact that contributions can be "bloat" and that
developments can turn out to be devastating mistakes. Such
developments, by the time they occurred, can be extremely hard to revert
in a meritocracy that uses such a metric.

Furthermore, isn't it for free software projects applying such forms of
meritocracy that we see takeovers of free software projects by corporate
forces? Intending to seize control over a competitive free development,
all that a corporation has to do is assign a couple of full-timers to be
"contributors". In the "quantitative meritocracy" I tried to describe
above, they quickly and inevitably come up in the ranks. Finally, in
control of every strategic decision, they remove antagonists and hand
control of the project over to their corporate backers - mission
accomplished.

I think the fundamental mistake in such a meritocracy is that a
*quantitative* metric (for example the count of contributions) is used
to decide a *qualitative* property (namely the decisive influence in a
project).

One one last note, I more generally think that in the wider field of
science, phenomena such as commercialization of research and "Duh
Science" are powered by similar mechanisms.

Kind regards,
T.