Operating systems should avoid unnecessary politics [LWN.net]

Operating systems should avoid unnecessary politics

Posted Jun 30, 2026 21:15 UTC (Tue) by skissane (subscriber, #38675)
Parent article: Xsnow "protestware" in Debian

What happens if, hypothetically, an Israeli upstream package maintainer starts adding Israeli flag easter eggs displayed on Yom Ha'atzmaut, and that angers a pro-Palestine user? Keeping stuff politically neutral-including avoiding any country’s national flag (except in contexts when you include all of them)-would help Debian keep those kinds of intractable heated real world disputes out of the project. That implies, if upstream includes them, Debian should aim to patch them out if possible.

Now, including political messaging in the direct interests of the project - e.g. about copyright law reforms, etc - I think should be treated differently. But Debian has no distinctive political interest in the outcome of a war, separable from the general interests of all humanity-and people will interminably disagree about what those general interests are.

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Operating systems should avoid unnecessary politics

Posted Jul 1, 2026 9:23 UTC (Wed) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (1 responses)

There is no such thing as politically neutral.

Do you include support for e.g. trans or gender neutral, genderfluid,... identities? If not you discriminate against them, if you do Christians will claim you discriminate against them.

Do you include a geoip DB that includes Taiwan in China or one that shows it as a separate country?

Do you include national holidays where one country celebrates the independence from another in calendar programs?

Operating systems should avoid unnecessary politics

Posted Jul 5, 2026 1:05 UTC (Sun) by milesrout (guest, #126894) [Link]

The comment you replied to says "avoid unnecessary politics". If you have a field for selecting sex, it is necessary that you decide between either making it binary or not. If you have a geoip database, you need to decide what you're going to say for Taiwan, even if that is dependent on locale or whatever. If you have a database of national holidays, it's necessary to decide what to include.

There is also really nothing political about those things and there are easy solutions. For holidays and geoip, the easy solution is just to make it dependent on the locale. If you have zh_CN you show Chinese Taipei as a region of China, and if you have zh_TW you show the Republic of China as an independent country. If you have en_US you show the 4th of July as Independence Day, while if you have en_GB you don't show it as a holiday.

But this is not one of those situations. It is not necessary to include this "feature" at all. It's a purely political addition that is not necessary in any way.

Operating systems should avoid unnecessary politics

Posted Jul 1, 2026 18:00 UTC (Wed) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (1 responses)

Does this mean that Debian's packaged vim will be required to remove :help uganda because foreign aid is "political" and not "in the direct interests of the [Debian] project?" Or, if we're going to special-case charityware as allowed, does that extend to software that supports more controversial charities? What if an upstream wants their software to display rainbows in the month of June, ostensibly in support of The Trevor Project or a similar charity, will Debian remove that? Or is it "political" for Debian to spend resources on making such a change when the upstream is unwilling to do so?

The long and short of it is, I don't think these are useful questions for Debian developers to worry about. If software is causing some real, measurable harm to the user, then that is (at least potentially) a problem that can be addressed. But a blanket ban on politics quickly transforms into an intractable quagmire of arbitrary restrictions and contradictory requirements.

Operating systems should avoid unnecessary politics

Posted Jul 1, 2026 18:22 UTC (Wed) by rra (subscriber, #99804) [Link]

Yes. Exactly this.

I flatly refuse the request to avoid politics in my free software work. This is for a lot of reasons, but the most obvious is that politics is the main reason why I'm working on free software in the first place. The idea that there is some narrow set of (conveniently, often capitalist-libertarian and somewhat right-wing) set of politics that are "okay" for free software and all other politics have to be excluded is utter nonsense, and I will not be complying.

But I am still interested in finding ground on other principles that don't require that I adopt other people's political beliefs about such loaded issues as discrimination, such as a principle that authors of software should not use their power to act against the interests of the user. And I will advocate for that as a free software issue, because allowing people to be in control of their own computing is part of my politics. :)