> Firstly, I must point out to you that the overwhelming majority of > free software projects are not democracies; rather they are > meritocracies.
Agreed. But > Meritocracies are good things, Well, they _can be_ good things. In a situation (such as real-world politics) where the "merit" part of "meritocracy" is ill-defined to the extent that there isn't even any core definition that approximately everyone can accept, trying to do a meritocracy either ends up hopelessly confused or amounts, in practice, to a dictatorship by whoever gets to define "merit". > especially in the free software community where we ...don't have much trouble deciding on "merit". :-) > I was mad at David. I flamed him. I felt better. It's hard to > argue against that. Well, just because _you_ felt better doesn't mean that it was good for anyone or anything, even including you. (Not everything that makes you feel better is good for you.) Indeed, I have trouble thinking of any instance where a flame has had a good effect that could not have been better achieved without flaming. > If you go around being nice to people, you find out that you're > generally getting more help than you think you deserve. This is *so* true. Or at least I've found it has been in my life. The Threefold Law is not just a pretty saying - nor is its applicability restricted to magick. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML [EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ----------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body.
