We as developers need to do better and support people like Evan out there.
Eventually, we should also hold individual engineers who work at Facebook/similar accountable to a higher standard and reject their software even if it’s open source or wonderful (React).
When backdoors are added to your service framework, when dragnet data collection services copy every artifact of your digital existence in the name of "national security" or when algorithms have been trained to distinguish faces specificly of your race you will damn sure want to know who wrote that code and why. Its just naive to think tools exist outside of their intended function and political ends often determine those functions.
So if you honestly feel that a company is pure evil, you really ought to avoid any open source project they publish. Not because the code is political, but because everything surrounding the code is.
Which is why I disagree with Vue (and others) putting gigantic BLM banners on their sites.
Even if the cause is just, by mixing in politics, you create less of a common ground for those working on and using the code, thus creating rifts where there need not be any. Everything becomes "us" and "them".
With corps controlling main dev portals it will stay with us unless we have decentralized platform.
I suggest you read Larry Lessig's Code 2.0 book.
If your existence has never felt "political" to you, cherish that. I've been on the receiving end of many slurs and the occasional attempted assault, and I've watched politicians and pundits debate on cable TV whether I deserve to have the same rights afforded anyone else. I didn't choose to exist "politically", but I sure do notice when folks don't speak up against challenges to my existence because they view it as "politics" and therefore not worth their attention.
Reality, however, is there, whether we would like it to be there or not.
Look, I get it: sometimes you just want to put your head down and focus on technical details, and let someone else worry about the context. But keeping your head buried in the sand all the time isn't the answer.
My worry about your line of thinking, and the everything is political one, is that it feels a bit like eradicating diversity of thought and experience. To relate it to the start of this thread, plenty of the world outside the US will have so much of their own shit to deal with than the politics that are _important to you_ are not at all important to them.
For anyone to suggest or demand or require otherwise would seem to be quite imperialistic to me.
It isn't, but I can't see a benefit of dragging unrelated politics into software development, even though the topics might be important.
I recommend you read about Allison Parrish's new hacker ethic: http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/programming-forgetting...
The core questions she proposes are essential things every software professional should ask themselves and keep in mind as they work. The political context, and which players in that context benefit from the work you do, is not unrelated at all.
Pick your battles, as the saying goes. It is possible to care about issues without carpet bombing everyone with your concerns, or wedging politics into every discussion.
And similarly, be careful what you wish for. It sounds like a terrible and exhausting way to live.
https://www.vanderbilt.edu/oacs/wp-content/uploads/sites/140...