equality
It’s accepted wisdom that all men are created equal. A lot of people derive from this the idea that all people should be treated equally and have the same rights. It’s the basis for democracy after all. As such, many communities strive to achieve equality and even set it as their explicit goal.
However, in recent times there were two cases that made me doubt in equality as a good goal for any community. The first was the discussion about Fedora’s target audience, in particular defining the target as someone who “is likely to collaborate [...] with Fedora” which excludes a whole lot of lazy or uninterested people. The other is Lefty’s surveys where nobody wondered that the surveys assume everyone’s opinion is equally important.
Then there are a lot of places where not having equality is normal and everybody would look at you funny if you were to advocate it. Meritocracy is a very positive world in the open source development communities for example. It’s a known fact that the maintainer decides which patches go in and which don’t. (Luis Villa gave a talk about this at GUADEC 2003. Slides don’t seem to exist anymore.) So what’s the right way here?
I had a discussion about this with my girlfriend and we found a lot of similar places in the real world where groups wanted to appeal to everyone and ended up being unrecognizable from everyone surrounding them: The Greens for example became just another party without any differences. Apple is in the process of losing it’s style – you’re not special anymore if you have an iPhone or an iPod – everybody has one. And Google does evil these days. All of them saw an increase in “market share” in the process though.
So it seems that in the end it all comes down to this: Is it worth giving up one’s values for more market share?
I personally think everybody who tries to be inclusive is betraying his foundations and original goals. I’m not goint to call it “sells their soul”, because it sounds cheesy, but that’s how it feels to me. So GNOME, please do not give up requesting Freedom. And Fedora, please continue to target the people involved in being bleeding edge. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.