tilt! <tilt@???> writes:

[...]

>    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

While I like the wording of this, and while I'm convinced that the ideas
behind systemd I know of a horribly wrong-headed (to take a simple one:
Recoding a relatively small part of the system such that it ends up as a
seriously large part written in a notoriously difficult to use low-level
language 'for performance reason' is about as 'modern' as producing
highly durable ceramic bifaces would be and just about as useful) 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 :-)