I think the power of myth and marketing are far more powerful than you expect, especially those who pivot into tech via boot camps and such as an attempt to find a better field to work in. People flocking into tech seem to buy into the concept that the meritocracy will reward them. And unrelated to hiring, tech CEOs are often still regarded as ultra-rational geniuses despite some blowback.

Majority of OSS development is paid for. It is not done by unpaid volunteers feeding themselves by something else.

Some of it is like that, but not much.

As much as I like open source, there is a lot of myth making around it too.

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Second whether obvious or not, people argued that we meritocracy on these forums here for years. And some still do. At meritocracy peek, Github had even that meritocracy carpet or whatever it was.

I doubt that. The super-star projects with millions of users sure, but the majority of OSS is probably in the long tail of tiny one-man shows, Github projects with five stars, etc.

The small one person projects with 5 stars have nothing to do with "operating in some sort of strict high score board fashion" or meritocratic evaluation of anything.

Anyway, FOSS makes yearly polls about these topics. It is biased toward more involved projects, but again I don't think someone's one weekend demo is what is talked about here.