Eelco Dolstra steps down from NixOS Foundation board

As someone who often glibly repeats that claim, let me clarify what I really mean. I do not literally intend to claim that *every* technical problem can be usefully analyzed through the lens of politics. "Bubblesort is a bad sorting algorithm" is not a political statement.

What I really mean is this: Remember the "fun algorithms and data structures" stuff we all enjoyed playing with when we were learning to program? Well, in the professional world, most of us aren't working on that stuff full-time anymore, or even a majority of our time. Most of the actual day-to-day code that we're writing is one of the following:

* Glue code (code that moves data from one format into another, or applies a simple mechanical transformation).
* High-level library/middleware logic (code that decides which algorithms or data structures to apply to some data, with at least some understanding of what that data represents).
* High-level application logic (code that directly implements an application that the user can interact with).

I would say that almost all application logic is political (if you think hard enough), library logic is more often political than people give it credit for, and glue code is seldom political in its own right. Libraries (and frameworks, distros, and various other kinds of middleware) often maintain the fiction of not "knowing" what they're being used for, but the reality is that e.g. a GIS database is being used to store the location data of real humans (among other uses), not the location data of hobbits in Lord of the Rings. You cannot work on a GIS database and claim that act to be totally apolitical - human location data is an inherently political topic. So it goes for a surprisingly large set of other categories of library.

So if you're going to say that your work is 100% apolitical, you're claiming one of two things:

1. You work almost exclusively on pure algorithms and data structures, and/or glue code, and so you have no idea what the data actually represents.
2. You work on a library or other middleware, but the function your library performs is so basic and fundamental that it has no political implications whatsoever.

Also, you don't use the GPL or any other license with an overtly political preamble or the like. Yes, I know, not everybody agrees with the GPL's preamble, but it is a political statement, and it's right there in your COPYING.txt! Regardless of whether it has any legal effect (in some jurisdictions, it might inform the court's interpretation of the "spirit" of the license), some people will read it and draw inferences from it, whether you want them to or not. That is why the FSF put it there in the first place.

The SQLite developers have a somewhat credible claim to being apolitical. Maybe one or two other libraries. You can make a case for programming languages, but I'm not sure I believe it (e.g. Python is in practice a machine learning language, C++ a language for developing video games which are mostly proprietary, C# is Microsoft, Swift is Apple, JavaScript is drowning the web in nonsense, etc.). But if you don't fall into one of those categories, then you probably spend a nontrivial part of your time working on something that is, in some sense, political, and since that describes the vast majority of software developers, it is easier to just summarize it as "software is inherently political" rather than trying to explain all of this every time.