Remember that the term "meritocracy" was coined in a satirical essay about a dystopian society. It was not meant to have positive connotations.
I was tempted to give a perhaps too glib response that it allows them to live in a world where they might possibly be able to benefit from the advances wrought by the more talented, but that doesn't seem to get at your underlying concern.
My personal belief is that those who lacked the opportunities to develop themselves still deserve to live with dignity and full moral consideration, but that doesn't mean we should give them awards or accept their pull requests necessarily. Furthermore, if one apportions them a scarce resource at someone else's expense, I would consider that to be unjust.
It doesn't, but I don't think it should. Instead we should try to correct those social disparities.
I suppose I need to give my slightly inaccurate summary: trying to judge people just based upon their contributions ends up only benefiting the elite who had unfair advantages to begin with, and intentionally silences any effort to compensate people who have inherent social disadvantages.
But the actual article, which I have my doubts you've read, explains this better.
Sorry, I had read it before. I just didn't really get an opportunity to discuss it.
> I suppose I need to give my slightly inaccurate summary: trying to judge people just based upon their contributions ends up only benefiting the elite who had unfair advantages to get those advantages, and intentionally silences any effort to compensate people who have inherent social disadvantages.
I'm not saying perfect meritocracy is something we have, but it's something we should strive for and act under at least. We shouldn't over or undervalue contributions just because someone is a certain race/gender/etc in my opinion. It's patronizing and to do so seems only to contribute to the problem further.
The goal of an open source project should not be to fix social disadvantages but to produce the best possible product. They do this best via meritocracy, accepting contributions happily from anyone and choosing the best of them, not by rewarding or punishing people for things which they cannot change. Doing so makes the resulting product worse as you're not getting the best code from the best people, but instead discriminating on other factors unrelated to your end goal.
Is it really "racist" or "sexist" to say this? Is it not the truth?
EDIT: Added some wording to clarify.
Why? Lots of open source projects have social goals; for example, there's the Debian Social Contract, the Mozilla Manifesto, and Ubuntu is itself named after an humanitarian philosophy. These goals often override technical quality: Debian will rather ship a more buggy and incomplete FOSS software than one which doesn't comply with the Social Contract.
To answer why: because people want quality software and political agendas are a niche at best. There are much better places to address such things.
I don't agree with the notion that you can neatly separate "politics" from the rest of your life. Every action that you do which affects others is inherently political, and publicly distributing software is no different. By just following along, one is simply weakly supporting the status quo - which might be fine, but should be consciously chosen nevertheless.
Regarding whether I want worse software because of my political opinions, it's not really relevant what I want; I do consider having social goals as a valid position for an open source / free software project.
I am not supporting the status quo, I am simply supporting the best possible software we can produce. And I don't believe we produce that by rewarding or punishing people based on factors they can't change. This is not a matter of "following along", this is a matter of using the best people to the best of their abilities, regardless of these factors.
Freedom 0 according to the FSF is the freedom to use the software for any purpose (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html). Genocide included. I don't see why that would make anyone switch unless the authors publicly said "yes, we support this genocide".
Software is a tool, plain and simple. A better example right now would be Tor or Bitcoin. People aren't flocking away from those for their use in crimes...
"We are not mistreating them! We are treating them equally. We are keeping the races separate because [whatever reason], but nobody is being mistreated. We are being well-intentioned and everyone can still have equality."
The people who believed and supported separate-but-equal were genuinely thinking they were well-intentioned. They thought it was a good and necessary thing.
Many still do about a small subset of life. Separate bathrooms, separate living quarters, separate locker rooms, etc.
Perhaps, just perhaps...instead of spending time dealing with the rug, she could have brushed up on her coding skills (since someone else had to fix her coding defects for her)?
Overcoming social disadvantage requires some work, you know.
She might not be socially disadvantaged with respect to inner city dwellers, but she's still socially disadvantaged with respect to men.
Please don't make me reiterate all of the things that women have to put up with and men don't, especially in tech. Just because she got a job does not mean that we've solved patriarchy.
On what planet is this a "disadvantage"?
You are a bit too antagonistic and you sound too emotional in your responses. Please be more charitable. I am not able to respond well to such an unfriendly tone.
Please explain how removing a rug promoting meritocracy makes things better for women.