Does open-source always have to be political?

Posted Mar 5, 2026 18:30 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
Parent article: Free software needs free tools

> "It's never with a bad intent. It's often like, oh, it has this feature that I cannot find anywhere else." But that is a slippery slope, he said, a bad spiral. Once the decision is made to use one proprietary tool, it becomes easier to do it the next time. "If our design guide is already in a proprietary software; maybe the next thing in the toolchain also could be like that. You don't have the same incentive to stay open." That, in turn, leads to exclusion.

I think this is making two common but flawed assumptions and simplifications about the motivations of open-source contributors.

Assumption: all open-source contributors care about politics, about the long-run, the greater good, vendor lock-ins, billionaires etc. Jan, the FSF and many other vocal people clearly and strongly care. But many other open-source contributors don't or not as much. Or, they care in some contexts (for instance: when they go and vote), but not when they are "carelessly" hacking this or that open-source project. For these other people, the short-term efficiency of a proprietary forge or some other proprietary tool may greatly outweigh longer term benefits and that is not an oversight.

Assumption: the "slippery slope" point implies that these "other people who care less" are naive, not aware of these trade-offs, not able to see the longer term and merely "taking the bait". I think that is oversimplified. I've seen numerous instances of developers very happy to use GitHub in general, yet recommend against this or that Github feature because it pushes the vendor lock-in too far for them. Not naive at all but rather making short-term efficiency trade-offs very consciously.

I've worked with many "pragmatic" and more quiet engineers who enjoy and prefer open-source mainly because it's _more efficient_ than some proprietary alternative. Except... in other cases where some proprietary is more efficient. Until it isn't when some open-source alternative becomes "good enough". Then they drop the proprietary tool. They may or may not have political opinions but these opinions do not consistently influence their open-source practice. Is that so wrong? I don't think so.

> One of the contradictions of the modern open-source movement is that projects which respect user freedoms often rely on proprietary tools that do not: communities often turn to non-free software for code hosting, communication, and more.

Is that really a contradiction? Is it not possible to enjoy open-source from a more pragmatic and less political angle too? Pretty sure it is. I can think of many worse contradictions in our daily lives.

When some open-source project has a mix of contributors with a wide range of political (non-)opinions, does its governance automatically belong to the more political people? It tends to because the people who care about politics are obviously more vocal and care about power more... but does it always have to be this way? Or could decisions be more "democratic" and per-project? In many projects they are already.

There is nothing wrong with open-source as a political project. But I think there is nothing wrong with open-source as an a-political project either. There is nothing wrong with trying to convince others that open-source should be political. But it is naive to assume that every open-source contributor will care about politics once they have been better "informed" - they just they forgot to think about it. Or even care about the long term! Often enough, people want to achieve great things today; not in a few decades for their children and grand-children (assuming they have any which is less and less true).

In many projects people from all angles even manage to get some open-source work done together. Sometimes on Github even, go figure!

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Does open-source always have to be political?

Posted Mar 6, 2026 12:50 UTC (Fri) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152) [Link]

I agree with your points. I don't like it either that some people consider that opensource is sort of a "package" by which you have to wear too short a t-shirt, have a beard, express certain political views and only have certain motives for sharing your work with others (and often you see some of them violently disagree on certain political points). While I can have political debates with some people, for me this has nothing to do in contributions and I welcome anyone to participate to the projects I maintain, what matters is the quality of the contributions and the willingness of the contributors to make the effort of doing their best. The rest is totally irrelevant and orthogonal. One nice thing I realized with opensource is that you get contacts with people all around the world with first names that you can't tell whether they're male or female, names that do not reveal any country, skin color, religion, political views or whatever, and it works pretty well. That's exactly why I don't want to know such points from contributors and am not interested in the reasons why they value opensource.

On another point (closer to the main topic), I do use GitHub for the projects I maintain, but only as if it were not the definite choice. This means that GitHub is essentially used as a publication mirror for me. For haproxy we moved there for the issue tracker (which is convenient and mostly hassle-free for reporters), and now we appreciate the CI. But we continue to act as if we were migrating away tomorrow. For example commit messages contain all the details about issues and do not just say "fixes #1234" because this might disappear one day. And conversely I ask contributors to respect the tools and infrastructure we're using for free because we know it does have a value and it helps us, and needs to be respected (e.g. do not abuse resources). We're seeing it as a win-win, we benefit from their platform, they have one well-maintained project with users. But if one day it must end, we'd find something else.

Does open-source always have to be political?

Posted Mar 8, 2026 11:36 UTC (Sun) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (1 responses)

Using GitHub means requiring project participants to agree with GitHub TOS.
This is not different from a contributor agreement, except this is implicit.

Does open-source always have to be political?

Posted Mar 8, 2026 14:06 UTC (Sun) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

I just had to look at GitHub's terms of service and I didn't find anything odd. But IANAL.

You have a point though: "less political" open-source contributors will pay much more attention to specific points like "Did you see GH TOS 3.14, what do you think of it?" as opposed to "Proprietary! Closed-source! Bad!"

Now you just need to elaborate.