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Every project has politics
Quoting: Every project has politics - Duck Alignment Academy —
From time to time you’ll see someone talk about keeping politics out of open source, as if open source projects are some bastion of purity that shouldn’t be tainted by such base things. This is a silly statement to make. As soon as two or more people interact, politics becomes a consideration. Your project is political.
Politics is knowing how to convince others of the merits of your proposals. It’s knowing how to graciously accept your proposal’s rejection. It’s what you do to make people feel like welcome, valued members of your community. Ultimately, politics is the culture that you create (or allow to happen) in your project. There’s a reason that project governance sounds a lot like government — they set the structure in which decisions are made.
“Oh, I didn’t mean lower-case politics, I meant upper-case Politics. You know, the things that politicians yell at each other about on TV.” Nope. Still silly.
The very foundation of free and open source software, the license, is enabled by a creative use of copyright law. Laws are, of course, quite political. Even the notion that people should have the freedom to inspect, use, and modify software is a political position.