Has anybody ever wanted politics in any of their software?
Edit* To expand I think it was and we are naive if we believe we aren't making political statements with a lot of the choices we make.
This is definitely a terrible and destructive decision by the maintainer(s) but not because its politics.
I’m not saying this malware is good (it’s not), but this question deserves an answer in its own right.
Then there's the politics of protest, and you sure as hell don't want those in any critical software. Would you want the software that controls your water supply to be similarly politicised in the way this peacenotwar package does? No - because water supply should be politics free at providing the actual service (i.e. water) even though the actual infrastructure was funded by politicians.
We have extraordinary privilege and power as workers. We have the power to make the world better. The people who want to make it worse already see us and our domain as an attack vector. We cannot change that. We should rise to the occasion, not declare neutrality in its face.
Nothing in my position is against engineers having political opinions, or campaigning for what they want, or resigning or whatever. I just think that that's not appropriate in terms of the actual service they concretely provide to society during their employment.
I think I agree with you in some ways, but this is an odd example to give of something that’s not politicized. The prioritization of who gets protection in a light cycle, who the light cycle timing is optimized for, who gets detected to influence the signaling and who doesn’t… those are absolutely political choices. (And here in the US where I am they almost always prioritize the movement of cars above all else.)
It’s already political. Those targets are already used when people see fit to use them. What I want is for us to stop pretending that there’s a possibility of a multi-trillion dollar industry that can be absent political impact and conflict. It cannot happen. We need to be engaged politically because many of those impacts are or will be harmful like you say. We also need to be engaged because our neutrality determines what is and isn’t acceptable as a status quo. And yes, in certain very specific circumstances we need to decide whether our conscience rejects, accepts, even abides or joins certain demonstrative or material actions even if they’re generally out of bounds. We live in a world. It’s nowhere near so compartmentalized.
# insert "{{President Biden's}} poor economic policies have led to..." into db
“Error: PoliticalProtestInSQLModule error at or near ‘poor economic policies’ - Postgres has determined that you are ignorant and wrong, and includes this warning in the off chance you are open to listening to reason. Be thankful we still let you insert the string into the DB.”
We, humans, live on a planet with other humans. We make complex choices every day about how we participate and the compromises we do or don’t accept. Every technology that has any meaning for real people has a role in that. We cannot be neutral even if we wish to be, we don’t even know what neutral is.
When I say that my interest is rooted in anti-colonialism, I’m trying to be very clear: people who were and have been regarded as non-existent rightly used disruption and even violence to be more seen and heard. It doesn’t have to be violent. It does have to be disruptive. You don’t get to determine the terms of that, you just have to accept that what’s neutral to you might not be neutral to others… and let your moral judgment be what it is.
Edit: and yes I did see if I could edit the Putin page to say he’s a piece of shit, of course I could not. But I certainly would have.
What is your goal with doing this? Do you expect someone will be persuaded to dislike Putin because of this? Do you think it's acceptable for Putin supporters to vandalize Ukraine's Wikipedia page?
You can say "politics is in everything", but that hasn't stopped Wikipedia from being a pretty good resource for information. Do you think everyone's protests should be kept up and Wikipedia be a wasteland of vandalism? Or are you relying on volunteers to spend their time taking down your vandalism?
Wikipedia's rules for content seem pretty good. They take down blatant political bias. I would call that "no politics", but I presume you wouldn't call it that. Why not expect this in OSS?
Further it ignores that there’s a difference between related political concerns and unrelated political concerns within any given activity. Statistically some software maintainers are going to be evangelical christians. They don’t need to be using their node packages to evangelize or drop “god hates fags” messages on computers in IP blocks belonging to pride month participants. Statistically some are going to be communists. They don’t need to be dropping Karl Marx quotes into software installs running in republican strongholds. Some are going to be antivax, they don’t need to have their nose packages start sending “vaccines cause autism” messages to the logs. Some are going to be Biden supporters, they don’t need to be having their packages delete files when installed on computers run by Bernie Sanders supporters.
In fact even for tangentially related topics, unilaterally changing the conditions of the interaction you have with your fellow maintainers and developers in order to insert your current important political issue into their machines is a fundamentally dick move. The GPG maintainers might be all about encryption and encryption rights, but if the EARNIT act passed tomorrow and in response they quietly changed all versions of gpg to send plaintext unencrypted copies of everything it’s asked to encrypt or decrypt to Wikileaks as a protest, that’s still a dick move even with the politics being explicitly related. It’s unnecessarily bringing politics (encryption rights) into a non political transaction (using encryption software to encrypt something).
When people say they don’t want politics in their software that’s what they’re taking about. They don’t want people taking an existing agreed upon sphere of politics and influence and suddenly injecting new rules into it that fundamentally alter that relationship.
Claims like these are, presumably, in good faith, but to make these claims you have to skirt the reality that "don't talk about it" functionally ends up being a tacit acceptance of the status quo. And that status quo has a lot of people downrange of it who the more comfortable among us (and I for one am very comfortable) may find much more palatable if they'd just shut up--but the world is more existential than discomfiting for them, and we should respect that.
There are many cases where one's existence is a political question; much of America, for example, thinks the right to existence of LGBTQ folks is up for debate. When the fact of your existence is controversial, your existence is political--and it is rather difficult to criticize someone for acting as such.
On the other hand, an evangelical Christian doesn't have to drop slurs in a package. They already have a world where people are beaten and killed for being gay, even with the prodigious successes of our LGBT siblings to date. They still have the world that they want--they're just not happy with the slope of the function.
One of these things is not like the other.
I would love for you to expand upon that, why you believe that? I am not aware any wide spread opposition to the "existence" of LGBTQ people, I am aware of wide wide spread resistance to Speech Codes (enforced use pro-nouns), Sexual education to minors, Allowing children to transition under the age of 18, allowing children to transition with out the consent of the parents, and other topics around CHILDREN.
Is that what you refer to when you state that the "existence" of LGBTQ people is under threat in the US?
To equate my statement to being "equating LGBTQ people with sex and sex only" likely means you have no desire for an honest dialog.
I will say though it is likely we disagree on these issues because I do believe parental consent and transparency is critical and non-optional and will never agree that state actors (i.e schools) should with hold information from parents for any reason outside illegal abuse which should be reported to the proper authorities and investigated criminally with full due process protections, not under the some guise that the schools/teachers know best.
Part of the reason I can’t is… there are things I can’t be neutral about because lives depend on it, including my loved ones and my own in some cases.
I don’t think this was the right way to put very real human cost into software as an agent of change or discussion, but I can think of ways it could be (because) I can think of dozens of other ways necessary social progress would have been impossible without people interjecting “neutral” which wasn’t.
And if that feels too radical for you or HN, let’s not forget that this is a common tactic of combat (and the “political” subject is literally war). Railroads and landing strips aren’t instruments of war, they’re ostensibly neutral. But they’re widely regarded as conventional targets because they facilitate otherwise non-neutral activity. The same goes for any other infrastructure.
Again I don’t think this was a helpful action. But I think it was an inevitable one, and I think hoping for neutrality in software is just naive.
But that does not mean that I turn every discussion on HN, even discussions related to political things into a discussion about my specific personal issues. The fact that you and I aren’t hashing those issues out right now is not a tactic endorsement of the status quo. And it would be ridiculous for me to use my power as a software developer and maintainer to start inserting messages about my stances on these issue into the software I maintain and distribute, and it would be especially ridiculous for me to start distributing malware along a trusted supply chain because of those issues.
Asking that software be a neutral ground with respect to certain political topics or activities is not an endorsement of the status quo or a dismissal of your completely valid concerns. It’s a recognition that there is a time and a palace to discuss, debate or even fight about very important issues. But not every time and every place is the appropriate one.
Or put another way, and taking out of the software realm, if neutrality is inherently political and some political things are too important to leave any place neutral, then what issues do you believe we should start militarizing the moon for? Is the human cost of this war sufficient for the US to start deploying military assets to the moon? Or even just militarizing (more so than it is for spy satellites) earth orbit and deploying kinetic weapons into space? Perhaps the US and EU should unilaterally take full control of the ISS and imprison the Russian cosmonauts onboard?
Or is that plainly ridiculous and is there value in attempting to preserve as much neutrality within space as possible given the current situation? Perhaps it is worthy to not escalate political boundaries in certain areas even when the political item in question is of extreme importance.