Nerderati

In democracies, power is held by the citizens. The problem with this (at least in terms of open source software) is that, by and large, people are dumb.

The root of the problem lies in the fact that many people approach code in a selfish, rather than Utilitarian, manner. Of course, this is a non-issue in circumstances when you are writing code that will never be released to the public. But for those of us that do work and contribute to open source codebases, utilitarianism is a smart (and thankfully prominent) modus operandi. If the core developers of some popular web frameworks started adding classes and methods in their respective codebases to properly parse Flickr LOLCODE, I’m sure a few concerned voices would be heard.

Open Source is not a Democracy. It’s a Meritocracy.

Plato seemed to have addressed this issue in his famous Socractic diaologue of The Republic, suggesting that the ideal form of government was one formed of philosopher-kings. If we disregard the pompous title of ‘philosopher-king’, Plato’s idealized form of government is quite similar to how most open source projects are managed. Core members are not elected by the community. Rather, they are appointed to their position based on their qualifications, and are tasked with governing in such a manner that will yield the greatest good for the greatest number of people. This resembles most open source organizational methods quite well¹.

As such, I’ve come to this conclusion: Open Source is not a Democracy. It’s a Meritocracy. There are no political parties, campaigns or lies and promises. Instead, a person is judged entirely by the code that they write, and the relative usefulness of the later to the community at large. No one is ‘elected’ into an open source team. You get invited, usually (and hopefully) on the basis of your individual merit and perceived dedication to the project.

And the crazy part? This actually works. Open source produces some fantastic software. Much of the internet and the web runs on open source stacks, and those numbers don’t seem to be dropping anytime soon. Add to that the incredible advances that have been made in the last decade in open source desktop and so-called ‘enterprise’ software, and the above conclusion is undeniable.

Is a Meritocracy the best philosophy under which we should write code? Perhaps not. But I can’t think of anything better.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

^[1] The only exception that I know of is FreeBSD, where they hold elections for the core team every two years. This (surprisingly) seems to work extremely well for them.