Eelco Dolstra steps down from NixOS Foundation board

Yes, I personally find that style of argument, while true, isn't very strong to me. I tend to look at it one of two ways:
- As you said, software is inherently political because software development is inherently political because software is developed by humans and those humans are political entities and exist in a poltical context
- Software is inherently political by generalization of Conways Law. We already treat it as a truism that software will inherently develop in a way that reproduces and thus reinforces the circumstances under which it was made. It would be strange to argue that this somehow only applies to office politics and not something as fundamental as the worldviews of the people making it or the political context under which it was made.

These both offer good counterarguments to the disclaimer above that that projects like SQLite might be apolitical. Both their software development practices are highly political (making your code of conduct the 10 commandments is definitely a choice) as are the imbued ideas and assumptions, with the single-node-single-process model originating from it's creation for use in guided missile destroyers vs the single-server-many-user batch processing heavy model formed by big business (including of course also the military) logistics.

Another aspect is that in common discussion, there's sometimes a misunderstanding between something being political and something being partisan. Indeed, there are many people who have the luxury of being able to be detached enough from politics think these two things are the same thing. What is partisan depends highly on when and where you are and indeed many highly political things are not generally partisan. Again the US military offers a good example there, with it's size and international role being uncontroversial enough domestically to be politically irrelevant.

There's also a final and I think most correct argument, which is: So what? Why does it matter whether that thing is political or not?

Litigating what is and isn't political only matters if it being political or not changes how we approach the situation. But claims of something being political generally goes one of two ways: Either you espouse a need to "ban politics", by which you mean banning anything of controversy, which would effectively prevent any change away from the current situation that benefits you. Or you're trying to bring awareness to the inherent choices we make when developing software, which you are probably doing because you are trying to bring awareness to the fact that these choices are malleable, deserve introspection and believe they can and should be changed, as I do. In either case, the argument does not benefit much from trying to pin down what is and isn't political.

None of these things are political at all. Repeatedly stating that they are doesn't make it true.