> Perhaps it's high time we drop the charade of "meritocracy" and admit that software projects, FOSS or otherwise, are run by humans with human emotions and hum

> Perhaps it's high time we drop the charade of "meritocracy" and admit that software projects, FOSS or otherwise, are run by humans with human emotions and human reactions, and that for better or worse, the majority of the developer community makes decisions based more on emotion than on a dispassionate evaluation of a project's merits. A thousand times this. Being a participant in various FOSS things and other projects I have come to learn that the idea of a meritocracy is a thought terminating cliche. It is perpetuated by the nerd culture around FOSS that can program beautiful stuff day in and day out but has a chronic deficiency in social ability. I know it's kind of a worn-out point by now and I will probably gather downvotes for it, but that's the sad truth of the matter. As nerds, we like to reduce our reality to technicalities, those pesky old meat space constraints only hold us back! And that works well for a couple of years when one quarter of the community awakens to their social core, realizing the community around them in horror while another quarter of the community doubles down and goes borderline sociopathic. Then those two sides fight a bitter fight and the whole community suffers. To me, all this comes down to one problem: centralization. If you don't reduce your scope and humble your ambition, you will fall by it. Happens. Every. Time. Canonical always aspired to be the Linux distro but to achieve that, it had to accept a cost to the community in form of collateral damage. It's human constraints holding back FOSS. Ambition in the misguided few (sadly, mostly people who aspire to and assume leadership positions), carelessness and sheep behavior in the idealistic many. There is no technical solution to this and technical solutions is what the majority of FOSS participants come in for. Only to find that - surprise! - the FOSS community has the same meat space constraints as every other goddamn thing on this planet. Until we put more emphasis on not letting social skills atrophy in this atrophy-enabling climate, this history will simply keep on repeating itself.