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Comment by ryan-allen | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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