Is a Pure Meritocracy Possible in Open Source?

I've been asking myself this question a lot lately.  Before we continue this discussion, let's look at how Meritocracy is defined (as by Wikipedia):

Meritocracy is a system of a government or other organization wherein appointments are made and responsibilities assigned to individuals based upon demonstrated talent and ability (merit). In a meritocracy, society rewards those who show talent and competence as demonstrated by past actions or by competition. Evaluation systems, such as formal education, are closely linked to notions of meritocracy.

Some open source projects like the Apache claim to be a meritocracy where contributors gain "status" by their merits usually through contributions (code, documentation, mailing lists, tutorials, etc.).  Some people say that the Apache Project is more egalitarian than meritocracy however I'm not writing this to lobby either case.

In the terms of the projects I'm involved with, the biggest for me is the Mach-II Project.  A lot of people on Team Mach-II were asked to be on the team because of pure merit.  Flashback to 2005 when I started with Mach-II and apply merit to me, I would never be selected -- I was too green.  I would say we try to run Mach-II as a meritocracy as much as possible, but I definitely believe there is a bit of benevolent dictatorship in the mix as well.

In the end, not every decision can be made by committee. At least a "good" decision made.  Some of the problems with committees are while they take account of a bunch of different view points they are terribly slow to move and sometimes produce less than desirable results.  Then introduce politics (especially when financial implications of multiple parties are involved) and things typically grind to a halt.  Committees only work when all parties involved want the same result.  I have little patience to be part of committees / processes that are jaded that progress can be made despite have multiple parties with different financial interests.

This is one of the reasons why committees by company / association appointment in open source just don't work.  Money will nearly always triumph over pure idealistic concerns even when "doing the right thing" would be better.  Does this mean that humans are just greedy by nature? I'm glad I don't have to answer that question (it's been a funny premise on the Simpsons before as well).

People appointed by merit (and not company / employer association) typically share a common goal.  However, who is to break a stalemate?  This why most "meritocracies" still have some person in the "dictatorship" role.  In regards to Mach-II, I definitely play this role.  In the Rails project, DHH still plays the role of the dictator when needed.

So yes, I believe meritocracies can exists, but in certain situations somebody has to play the role of "dictator" / "president" / etc.  However meritocracies need transparency to function properly.  Transparency will be a subject for a future blog post.

Do you know if this is a Honey Locust Tree?

We're located in Minneapolis, MN and the photos were taken today (May27).  Based on my limited knowledge of trees and my searching on the interwebs, I've come to the weak conclusion that we have Honey Locust Tree in our backyard.  Are you a tree expert or know more than I do? Then comment on the type of tree we have.  And if I know you, I owe you beer / drink the next time I see you.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Edit 6/3/2010:

According to my friend Adrian (see comments for links), this is a black locust tree due the size of the seed pods.

A Contrabass French Horn (Video)

via youtube.com

OMG! I nearly shit myself seeing a Contrabass French Horn playing an excerpt from Ein Heldenleben.

The Feud: Debian-Ubuntu Relationship (via Debian.org Mailing Lists)

On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 10:32:09AM +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:

>   I've been invited to give a talk at the forthcoming Ubuntu Developer
> Summit, on May 13th in Brussels. I've accepted, since I'd like to take
> the chance of the talk to present to the Ubuntu (and Canonical) people
> how we feel about the state of the Debian-Ubuntu relationship. I'm
> therefore seeking your feedback on the topic, in order to present our
> views rather than mine only.

So, I'm now back and with some feedback to share. I'll first post (in
this mail) a summary of the replies I got to this "poll" and later on a
more general summary of what I did at UDS.

Figures

I got about 50 feedback mails in a bit less than 2 weeks, which I
consider a fair amount of feedback. In case people are interested in
giving more feedback, by all means go ahead and mail me. The more, the
better. Obviously, the summary I report below is limited to the
feedback mails I got thus far.

Success stories

I got quite an amount of "submissions" for the success stories category
(frankly, more than I expected).

The most appreciated collaboration paradigm between Debian and Ubuntu
seems to be "mixed teams", where people from both distros work together
using some $VCS. I got report about a dozen such teams, of varying sizes
from a handful of packages to several hundreds. An interesting and
appreciated trend is that such teams usually lead to a direct
involvement in Debian by Ubuntu people: first as DMs, then as DDs, and
in some cases also to greater involvement such as becoming members of
our core teams (e.g.: ftp-master).

Other reported success stories are in the development of some core tools
such as dpkg and d-i where, starting from Ubuntu-specific needs, generic
technical solutions have been developed, benefiting not only Debian and
Ubuntu, but all possible Debian derivatives.

People also appreciate bug filing from Ubuntu [1] (especially if with
patches [2]) in the context of large changes such as the default gcc
version.

Interestingly enough, even for parts of the two distros that are
packaged independently (e.g. GNOME), some Debian people have now more
trust in Ubuntu patches than in the past and that entails a more
fruitful exchange or cherry pick of patches.

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?tag=origin-ubuntu;users=ubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com

[2] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?tag=ubuntu-patch;users=ubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com

FAIL.

Now to what people don't currently like in the Debian-Ubuntu
relationship.

I won't spare much mail space to discuss episodes that concern
individuals. In fact, one such episode (i.e. the "python affair", see
#573745) has been reported by several people, and details can be found
in the tech-ctte bug log.

Beside that, people don't like when Canonical does not behave as a good
upstream, e.g. when they are not reactive to Debian developers as their
downstream distributors. More generally, people would like to see
efforts in packaging Canonical software---when is not Ubuntu
specific---into Debian directly.

Similarly, people don't like when Ubuntu does not behave as a proper
downstream. In particular, there seems to be a desire to have more
triaging of Launchpad bug and then forwarding to the Debian BTW when
they apply to Debian too (no surprise here: it is the most "traditional"
complain Debian had wrt Ubuntu).

Several people do care about the status of their Debian packages in the
Ubuntu distribution. As a consequence, those people find annoying when
those packages degrade in quality due to reasons not under their control
(e.g. they are synced in bad moments, patched inappropriately, etc.);
that seems to mostly affect the Ubuntu universe.

Requests

The last category of feedback sought in the poll was "requests".

A recurrent request is to give more credit to Debian. Coming from the
tradition of free software, people have no problem with the fact that
Ubuntu benefits from Debian work, but they feel that the mantra "give
credit where credit is due" should be better respected. All in all,
people don't like the equation "GNU/Linux = Ubuntu" which is slowly
getting through.

Another recurrent request is to push the culture of "do changes in
Debian first". That would mean discussing changes in Debian first; then,
*if* an agreement can be reached (which is not necessarily the case, of
course), people would like to see those changes implemented in Debian
first; from there, they will naturally flow to Ubuntu.

Then, I've also collected tons of technical requests related to how
Debian people can more easily interact with the Ubuntu infrastructure
(most notably with Launchpad) in "their" way, i.e. via mail, via the
Debian BTS, etc. In that category---that I won't detail to avoid abusing
your patience---there is stuff like: an opt-in service to be notified of
Launchpad bugs, Ubuntu accepting uploads from our keyring, Ubuntu having
something like patch-tracker.d.o to better split patches, etc.

While on the above I've noticed no real convergence, it seems that in
general those Debian people which care about their packages in Ubuntu,
would like to have a contact point where to drop sync requests. It seems
that using the suggested way to do that (don't ask me what it is :))
does not really work, as they get lost in the noise or similar.

via lists.debian.org

Ok, for the first time I've seen -- a real account of the feud going on why some people are hating Canoncial (the makers of Ubuntu). Lately, I see 140 character posts on Twitter or Identi.ca that is just "complaining" without any real concrete reasons. If this is the reason, then there is something you complain about. However, denting/tweeting is not a good format.

Alien Arena - Fix audio/sound on Ubuntu

Just recently started playing Alien Arena for fun (free) on Ubuntu which is Quake II or Unreal Tournament.  AA is available for Windows, Linux and FreeBSD.  However, I found that after upgrading to Ubuntu Lucid 10 that the audio no longer functioned.  Open up Synaptic Package Manager and see if "libopenal1" is installed.  Installing the Open Audio Library packaged fixed the issue for me.  See you on AA.

Google Me - The Documentary Film

My wife and I just watched Google Me - a film by Jim Killen and stars seven guys named Jim Killeen.  Jim travels the global to meet other Jim Killeen's and find out about their life.  He only meets people get can find on Google.  An interesting concept.  And for your viewing pleasure, you can watch on Hulu:

[hulu id=lW9PLkpIgIv-wobKxeB18w width=500]

 

Google screws Scroogle (via The Register)

Scroogle, the privacy-friendly Google scraper, has been crippled by changes to one of the dominant search engine's interface pages.

The unheralded alterations to google.com/ie yesterday could mean Scroogle has to be "permanently retired", its operator Daniel Brandt wrote.

via theregister.co.uk

As a full-time user of Scroogle for years, I was saddened to see Scroogle crippled yesterday. Google has not way of doing private searches. I don't agree with Google's chief executive Eric Schmidt regarding privacy: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

There is a difference between wanted to hide your search because you're doing "evil" or just not wanting to share with another company about what you search for. It's not that I search for anything terrible, but in end I think my searches should be my own if I wish. I especially see this as important since more and more of our lives are being "put" online forever without our direct consent.