The Meritocracy Trap: From Open Source Ideal to Billionaire Weapon

Part 2: The Open Source Dream

In Part 1, we explored how Michael Young's dystopian warning about meritocracy became reality, transforming from satire to Silicon Valley scripture. Now we turn to my own journey through the open source movement, where I learned firsthand how genuine meritocracy could work—and watched it get systematically corrupted.

I came to open source as a money-strapped university student in the early 1990s. I needed software that cost more than my semester's tuition, so I'd subscribed to the Minix newsgroup hoping for alternatives.

When Linus announced his "hobby" operating system, I was instantly interested. Not out of idealism, but desperation. I needed tools I couldn't afford. This was free. Done.

But something unexpected happened. Unlike commercial software that hid its inner workings, this came with source code. I could see how everything worked. When something broke, I could fix it. When I had an idea for improvement, I could implement it. My little patches would be evaluated at the same level as contributions from Berkeley professors and Bell Labs engineers.

The system that started as a cheap alternative became proof that thousands of people could build something as complex as an operating system without corporations, without hierarchy, without even meeting face to face.

I'd arrived seeking free as in beer. I stayed for free as in speech.

It felt like we'd solved Young's puzzle. We'd created meritocracy without hierarchy, opportunity without exclusion. We were naive, but beautifully so.

The Cathedral Falls, The Bazaar Rises

To understand what we built and what we lost, you need to understand what we were rebelling against. Traditional software development was pure cathedral: hierarchical, closed, credentialed. You needed the right job at the right company to even see the source code, let alone change it.

Richard Stallman fired the first shot in 1983. The GNU Project wasn't just about free software. It was about freedom itself. "Free as in speech, not as in beer," he'd say, though most of us appreciated both aspects. Anyone could contribute. More importantly, contributions would be judged solely on technical merit.

When Linus released Linux in 1991, he crystallized this ethos into practice. His management philosophy was devastatingly simple: "Show me the code." Not your resume. Not your connections. The code.

I watched this play out on newsgroups and mailing lists that today would seem impossibly primitive. No Slack, no GitHub, just email threads and Usenet posts where code patches flew back and forth. A high school student's optimization might be accepted while a senior engineer's was rejected. The only criterion: does it work better?

This wasn't ideological posturing. It was practical necessity. When your contributors are scattered across continents, connected by dial-up modems, you can't waste time on credentialism. You need efficient filters. Technical merit was the only filter that mattered.

Apache Points the Way

The Apache Software Foundation formalized what Linux had proven. They called their governance model 'meritocracy': government by merit. But Apache meant something specific by merit. They created transparent progression:

• User: You use the software

• Developer: You submit patches

• Committer: You've submitted enough good patches to earn commit rights

• Project Management Committee Member: You help govern a specific project

• ASF Member: You help govern the foundation itself

Each level required sustained quality contributions and peer recognition. No shortcuts. No politics. Just consistent, verifiable contribution.

I remember when I was first granted Core Developer status on a major open source project, a level that let me approve others' contributions. The Release Manager reached out and said, "we need help and we think your work is good enough." No ceremony. No politics. Just recognition that I'd demonstrated competence.

That was meritocracy. Real meritocracy. And for a brief, shining moment, it actually worked.

The Reality Check

But even in those idealistic days, cracks were showing. A 2006 European study found women comprised just 1.5% of open source developers. This wasn't about capability. Studies showed women's code contributions were accepted more often than men's when gender was hidden.

The problem was visibility. Meritocracy assumes equal ability to demonstrate merit. But demonstrating merit in open source required:

• Free time to contribute (easier when you're a single male)

• Confidence to submit patches publicly (easier without imposter syndrome)

• Thick skin for harsh code reviews (easier when you match the reviewer demographic)

• Self-promotion skills (easier when the culture already sees you as belonging)

In 2009, Kirrily Robert wrote "Why Meritocracy Really Isn't," identifying what we'd missed. Good work alone didn't win influence. You needed to promote that work, network at conferences, engage in mailing list politics. The very activities that favored those already privileged.

We'd built a system that was theoretically open to anyone but practically open mainly to people who looked like the founders: male, technical, with spare time and confidence to burn.

The Grand Experiment

I saw these as minor cultural problems that could be fixed. When I saw the opening to create and lead one of the largest open source infrastructure projects of the 2010s, I jumped at it. This was our chance to create genuine meritocracy at scale.

We studied what worked and what didn't. Linux had technical excellence but Linus's benevolent dictatorship, where one person made final decisions, created bottlenecks and arbitrary rulings. Ubuntu had Shuttleworth's vision but similar single-point-of-failure problems. Debian had democracy but paralysis, every decision requiring endless debate.

Our project would be different. We'd implement "lazy consensus" where decisions proceed unless someone objects with technical justification. Clear principles: open development, open community, open design, open source. No dictator, but no paralysis. True technical meritocracy.

The early days were magical. Code flowed from everywhere: tech giants, startups, universities, individuals. A developer from Brazil might solve a problem that had stumped Silicon Valley engineers. An intern's architecture suggestion might reshape the entire project. Merit was working.

Then the money took control.

The Corporate Capture

The pattern was subtle at first. The founding corporate sponsor had been supportive, even hands-off. But as the project grew, as enterprise interest accelerated, something shifted.

Business development teams who'd never written a line of code started appearing in architecture discussions. They had concerns. Market positioning. Competitive advantage. Enterprise requirements that mysteriously aligned with sponsor priorities. Within the sponsor's organization, these business folks wielded more power than those of us focused on the technical work. They viewed this as a marketing and PR property, when in fact, it was a technological endeavor.

They pushed through governance changes. One of the things that led to the poor process was their overreaction to negative blogs about a recent acquisition. The new structure created many weak technical leaders with very short terms. I knew that unless the project was led by a strong technical team, it would ultimately fail. The transparent progression from user to committer to core that Apache had proven became a facade. Technical merit still mattered on paper, but the real decisions flowed through different channels now.

I sat in a meeting where those business people defended putting one of their own into a leadership position, even though he had never committed a single line of code to any open source project. When pressed on his qualifications, he pointed to how many times he had installed a web server.

I watched the infrastructure I'd helped build get rewired in real time. The APIs still worked, but they routed through different servers now. The interfaces looked the same, but the backend served different masters.

Community members pushed back. We demanded transparent governance, elected leadership, vendor-neutral decision-making. Some of us warned that without a proper foundation, contributing was essentially donating free labor to corporations.

The response was predictable. We were being "divisive." We should focus on the code, not politics. Trust the process. Meanwhile, technical decisions increasingly aligned with sponsor business needs rather than community consensus.

The Lesson

Eventually, after much struggle, an independent foundation was created. But the damage was done. Many core contributors had left, trust was shattered, and the corporate capture playbook was now documented for others to use.

What I learned was this: meritocracy assumes shared values about what constitutes merit. When actors with fundamentally different goals enter the system, they don't break the rules. They redefine them.

To the business teams, merit meant market adoption, not code quality. Success meant corporate control, not community growth. They used our own openness against us, our transparency as a roadmap for capture.

This wasn't a bug in meritocracy. It was the feature. Any system that claims to sort by merit will be captured by whoever gets to define what merit means. And definition power, like all power, flows to those who already have it.

The Bitter Truth

I'd spent years building platforms based on meritocratic ideals. I'd seen it work in small communities with shared values. But I'd also seen how quickly it failed when power and money entered the equation.

The infrastructure was still there. The code still compiled. The APIs still responded. But the soul was gone, replaced by something that wore meritocracy's face while serving different masters entirely.

Young had warned us. A system that sorts people into deserving and undeserving will always be captured by those who benefit from narrow definitions of deserving. We thought we were different. We thought code was objective, that technical merit could resist political capture.

We were wrong. And soon, forces far more powerful than corporate sponsors would prove just how wrong we were. The corporate capture was just practice. The real transformation was about to begin.

Next: Part 3 - When Billionaires Redefined Merit. Elon Musk now says helping poor people threatens Western civilization. Peter Thiel declares democracy incompatible with freedom. This is what happens when meritocracy becomes theology and wealth becomes proof of godhood.