It's a orthogonal concern and isn't relevant to the discussion at hand. "Merit" in this context is based upon technical considerations and is unrelated to cont

It's a orthogonal concern and isn't relevant to the discussion at hand. "Merit" in this context is based upon technical considerations and is unrelated to contributors' personal finances and employment status. Contributors range from highly-paid consultants, through to academics, students, etc.. Debian contributors are volunteers. They volunteer their time, personal resources such as compute hardware, bandwidth etc. Some pay out of their pocket for running mirrors, compute resources and other infrastructure. Other parts are paid for by donations and infrastructure provision by sponsors. But far from all of it. So at a personal level, individuals must be able to support themselves sufficiently to be able to contribute. That's no different from working in any other volunteer organisation which requires a commitment of free time and other resources to participate. That's life. Nothing comes totally for free. The bottom line is that participation at a minimum requires you to donate some of your free time. You're a volunteer, not an employee. What more do you really expect here?