Operating systems should avoid unnecessary politics [LWN.net]

Operating systems should avoid unnecessary politics

Posted Jul 1, 2026 9:23 UTC (Wed) by taladar (subscriber, #68407)
In reply to: Operating systems should avoid unnecessary politics by skissane
Parent article: Xsnow "protestware" in Debian

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?

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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.