Meritocracy and entitlement

Via Planet Bazaar, this paragraph from a post by Paul Hummer caught my attention (emphasis mine):

Finally, I wrote an open ended question to myself to think about, and thought that maybe I’d throw it out here as well. For context, Jono Bacon was talking about community (y’know, plugging his book and all that :), and I wrote “Open source thrives on a meritocracy - how can we prevent feelings of entitlement?” I see this a lot in open source communities: people earn their “commit rights” and then start behaving like everyone owes them something. Collaboration is about peers, not about hierarchies.

Now I’m reposting that here because, although I’m not very keen on philosophizing myself, something in that thought was of immediate appeal to me.