Meritocracy is one of the founding principles of the free and open-source software movement. It is also one of the most controversial terms, and the gap between the different meanings people attribute to it is, in some projects, a source of real and damaging conflict.
Let us analyse the meaning of the word, because its potential ambiguity can significantly influence the debate and the various viewpoints.
The theory of legitimacy based on the commit graph
One version of meritocracy argues that governance authority should follow contribution, and that contribution is best measured through code. According to this view, the people who have contributed most to the code have the right to decide the project’s future, because they know the source code and have a personal stake in the most literal sense of the term.
This is not an unreasonable position for a project in its early stages. Although it is also necessary to consider infrastructure, raise funds, and manage relations with the media and institutions, when the main challenge is technical in nature, when the community is small, and when the stakes are low, it makes sense that those doing most of the work should also make most of the decisions.
The problem arises when the principle is carried forward unchanged into a very different context. A FOSS project that has been running for fifteen or twenty years, is used by millions of people, operates in a complex regulatory and legal environment, has enterprise users and political implications, is no longer the same thing. Applying the same governance from the early days to the reality of a large project does not produce good results, but rather a technically sophisticated and strategically blind organisation.
What the commit chart does not measure
The theory of meritocracy based on the number of commits has a blind spot: it measures only one type of contribution and renders others almost invisible.
Let’s consider what is not in the chart:
- The authors of the documentation who made the software accessible to users who would otherwise have given up on using it.
- The localisation team that involved entire linguistic communities in the project.
- The reviewers who transformed rough bug reports into reports ready for resolution.The community moderators who kept the project welcoming to newcomers at the cost of considerable personal effort.
- The people who spent years building relationships with media, institutions and the political sphere, creating the conditions for the software’s widespread adoption.
These contributions do not produce commits, but they do produce users, adoption, sustainability and relevance. In a mature project, they often make the difference between software that exists and software that matters.
A governance model that excludes these contributors from the decision-making process, or seeks to marginalise them, is a partial meritocracy in that it recognises only one type of excellence whilst ignoring all others.
The problem of conflicts of interest
There is a second dimension to this argument that merits analysis.
When a project’s governance also includes people employed by companies with direct commercial interests in the project’s direction, the issue of meritocracy becomes more complex. The question is not whether those contributors are capable—for they certainly are—but whether the governance structures built around their contributions can reliably produce decisions that serve the project’s mission rather than the interests of their employers.
This is not an accusation, but a simple observation. Conflicts of interest are not linked to bad faith, but are inherent in the situation. A governance model that fails to take this into account is no longer meritocratic, and is also less aware of its own limitations.
Healthy governance in a mature FOSS project requires a diversity of perspectives: people who contribute code, but also people who represent the user community, the institutional mission, and the long-term sustainability of the project as a public good rather than a commercial asset. It is not a question of excluding developers, but of ensuring that no single interest – however legitimate – is the sole factor determining decisions.
Building for those who come after us
All major FOSS projects are intergenerational, because the people who created them are not the ones who will sustain them in ten or twenty years’ time; therefore, the decisions made today regarding architecture, governance, and which contributions are valued and which are not will shape what the next generation inherits. And it must be something upon which to build, not something to be circumvented.
This completely redefines the issue of meritocracy. From this perspective, in fact, the measure of a contribution is not determined solely by its current value, but also by its value for the future of the project.
Meritocracy in a large open-source project does not lay in the accumulation of commits as a claim to authority, but in creating the best conditions for the project to continue growing in the future. The question is not who has done the most, but who is building something that the next generation can actually use and develop further.
Our sense of meritocracy
The original principle underpinning FOSS meritocracy remains valid: decisions must be made by those who do the work, who understand the consequences, and who have earned their place through genuine contribution rather than organisational politics. This principle must be preserved.
Contributions, however, can take many forms, and merit has a temporal dimension that the commit graph fails to capture. The merit of building the source code is real and deserves recognition, but this also applies to the merit of building a community, maintaining documentation, ensuring accessibility, navigating legal complexities, and securing the institutional relationships that keep the project alive for the people who will inherit it.
A true meritocracy finds a way to recognise and value all of this. A project that confuses meritocracy with the dominance of a single type of contributor, however expert, fails to live up to its own values. And a project that bends to the interests of a subset of contributors, at the expense of future generations, is not a meritocracy but a form of appropriation masked by the language of fairness.
Meritocracy is a complex, multifaceted concept that is worth grappling with in order to build something that future generations will be happy to inherit.