Tim Uckun (May 11 2025 at 22:44): Tim Uckun (May 11 2025 at 22:44):A big part of any open source project is the community. I am curious about your reaction when an open source project puts religious or political statements on their home pages or repositories.
We live in contentious times and there are wars happening all over the place. If a project says "free Palestine" or "We stand with Israel" will that sway your decision to use the product one way or the other. Same goes for supporting Russia or Ukraine or Pakistan or India or China or Trump.
As for me yes it does effect my decision. I don't want to support a project whose political and moral stances are opposed to mine.
What about you guys?
Ron Waldon-Howe (May 11 2025 at 23:40):Generally, I feel religion, politics, philosophy, and culture are all inextricably intertwined: we can't have humans (and especially multiple humans) without these things
So, it's a red flag for me if someone is upset by a project "being too political" because, to me, they're saying they don't care about other humans, or more typically, don't care about humans they disagree with
Tim Uckun (May 12 2025 at 02:03):Depends on the disagreement. I truly don't care about some people who disagree with me on some important issues. I don't have the energy to care about everybody.
Ron Waldon-Howe (May 12 2025 at 02:10):Exactly, I think it's entirely human to have opinions
And, I might feel that a specific position fits my values, or is something I don't feel strongly about, or is something I disagree with but can respect/understand, or is something too extreme/harmful/hateful for me to want to be associated with at all
Or, even if I do disagree, it might just be infeasible for me to avoid
e.g. I don't use Brave because of all of the reasons here: https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-brave-browser/
however, the creator of Brave also created JavaScript, and I consider it infeasible to avoid JavaScript
We have to pick our battles :)
Andrew O'Brien (May 12 2025 at 03:12):Copyleft is an inherently ideological stance. I’d include non-commercial Free As in Beer open source to some extent as well (when open source is not part of some kind of open core or support strategy). Any successful project will require a community and any community of scale will have politics.
I don’t know exactly how to relate that back to the question though, other than to say that I don’t think it’s possible to be apolitical in that context. Even neutrality is a stance.
Nabeel S (May 12 2025 at 03:16):The challenge I have with most of these political stances is that they pretend there's a binary choice when things are far more analog. Some Pro-Palestinians are racists. Others just want Palestinians to have the same rights as Jews. Pro-Israelis are diverse in a very similar way.
Not all debates are so ambiguous, but I see similarities in the Capitalism/Communism/Socialism as well as the pro-life/pro-choice debates. Each side pretends that everyone on the opposite side is the most extreme caricature of that argument. The optimal solution is probably somewhere in the middle.
All this is to say: Sometimes I think people choose to drop out of a political debate not because they don't care, but because they don't see any reasonable side to join.
Alexander Ou (May 12 2025 at 17:50):I would add that the binary choice that @Nabeel S highlights seems to me a self-reinforcing meta-ideology that may be a part of our evolutionary / biological heritage -- whereas before in order to band "together" against an "other" we used constructs like race, nationality, etc, these days there are a different set of more visible divisions that seem more granular, like positions along a political spectrum, or more commonly, a supposedly binary choice on some issue.
Also... the cynic in me thinks there's something about engagement at play here. Moderation seldom gets plays.
Tim Uckun (May 12 2025 at 22:14):There is this old joke.
Why are the catholics fighting the protestants in Ireland?
That's what happens in a country with no blacks, puerto ricans or jews.
I think there is a deep seated compulsion to other people in our dna. We are after all pack animals at our core.
For some reason we have failed to overcome this biological impulse. I look around me and I grow more despondent every day. People on one side of the wall or highway or the bridge live prosperous lives while the people on the other side live in grinding poverty, hunger and desperate need. In the mean while a handful of people control almost all the wealth in the world.
Nabeel S (May 12 2025 at 23:00):There is this old joke.
There's also a common Arabic saying "Support your brother whether is the oppressor or the oppressed."
Ron Waldon-Howe (May 12 2025 at 23:51):The tribal nature is so frequently the illogical impulse, too
Our social class is a greater predictor of commonalities than our race, but too often we see people identify with and defend billionaires of the same race
Last updated: Jun 28 2025 at 12:32 UTC