Operating systems should avoid unnecessary politics [LWN.net]

Operating systems should avoid unnecessary politics

Posted Jul 1, 2026 18:00 UTC (Wed) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
In reply to: Operating systems should avoid unnecessary politics by skissane
Parent article: Xsnow "protestware" in Debian

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.

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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. :)