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Comment by ajarmst | Hacker News Reader

I guess I'm officially part of the greybeards now. This sort of thing just makes me feel tired. I know it's naive to want your engineering projects to come without politics and drama (hell, I'm less than a decade junior to Stallman, I was there for some of the reasons politics came in), but part of me is all "just fork the damn code and let's move on".

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I think it's naive to believe there's something that comes politics-free at all. Engineers can be keen to get stuff done without political disputes, but from personal experience, that mostly just means not challenging anything taken for granted.

I think the very existence of the FSF is proof of the fact that you can't take politics out of even basic engineering questions. The real assumption is that anything apolitical is doing something more than pandering to your views.

Keeping politics out of work is just simple professionalism.

Sure, be an activist, but keep it out of work and do it on your own time.

Free software is explicitly a political movement.

It is a mistake to assume everything done within work hours is apolitical.

The problem here isn't the politics, it's the mission creep. Libreboot has clear techno-political goals, to free our hardware from the shackles of BIOS and UEFI.

It wasn't created to serve as a vehicle to protest a case of alleged sexual discrimination against a friend in a different project.

There are many ways to protest at perceived injustice, but I don't think derailing a volunteer project to do that is good for the movement as a whole.

> Free software is explicitly a political movement.

Yes, but it's a specific political theme. It's not a blank cheque for instrumentalizing your FOSS work for every topic you personally find important.

If you assume the false accusation was true, ignoring it would not be professional and it would be impossible to keep it to your own time. The mistake was the public and hasty reaction, not politics.

If the false accusation was true then there would be a lawsuit by now. Trial by social media can never provide true justice, only an ugly exchange of accusations that harms all parties involved. That's why we should keep personal matters out of the front page of software projects.

Yes, the public and hasty reaction was inappropriate. This is a very different claim than keeping politics out of the project.

Professionalism is very political. It's just mainstream, so from the inside it appears to participants as apolitical. Ask someone whose accent or hair texture is "unprofessional" or who can't afford "professional" clothing whether professionalism is political.

Sadly, the sort of activists we're talking about here seem to believe that their activism should pervade every aspect of their lives.

Part of the problem is this: who'd fork it? Who'd put in the effort? Sure, they alienated key members, but the people doing the bulk of the work were at the core, including Leah.

So, it's not so simple as forking and coming back when the dust has settled.

There were actually enough pissed off core members to pull off a fork - what was missing was a leader.

We'll see how all this ends up - but given Leah track record - the whole "leaving the GNU project", the allegations, her aggressive behavior towards competition - don't instill me a lot of confidence that the dust is settled for good.

Look at this for example - censorship happened just 3 days ago - they only reverted the issue after community backlash https://trisquel.info/en/forum/libreboot-issues-open-letter-...

If someone was missing, then there wasn't enough people.

It's a bit nuanced, but I guess you're right. There's the librecore thing - but AFAIK they didn't reach out to coop the other developers, they didn't publish their own builds, and the inertia was lost. What could be the straw that breaks the camel's back - would be for Leah to piss off Paul Kocialkowski, as he's the guy who wrote a big chunk of libreboot (especially the newer parts of the system, with the chromebooks); But time will tell.

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