Every project has politics

From time to time you’ll see someone talk about keeping politics out of open source, as if open source projects are some bastion of purity that shouldn’t be tainted by such base things. This is a silly statement to make. As soon as two or more people interact, politics becomes a consideration. Your project is political.

Politics is knowing how to convince others of the merits of your proposals. It’s knowing how to graciously accept your proposal’s rejection. It’s what you do to make people feel like welcome, valued members of your community. Ultimately, politics is the culture that you create (or allow to happen) in your project. There’s a reason that project governance sounds a lot like government — they set the structure in which decisions are made.

“Oh, I didn’t mean lower-case politics, I meant upper-case Politics. You know, the things that politicians yell at each other about on TV.” Nope. Still silly.

The very foundation of free and open source software, the license, is enabled by a creative use of copyright law. Laws are, of course, quite political. Even the notion that people should have the freedom to inspect, use, and modify software is a political position.

Now, I will grant that your community spaces are probably not the best place to have vigorous debate on the political issues of the day. The rub is defining what is “political”. Some would call attempts to recruit and retain contributors from under-indexed groups political. The rest of us would call it “good for the health of the project.”

Some projects will explicitly make a political stand. That is their right. It is your right to decide whether or not that aligns with your project’s values.

It’s up to the community to decide what form of politics and discussion thereof is appropriate, and it’s up to the project’s leadership to make sure that boundary is enforced consistently and respectfully. To give you a starting point, here’s what I say whenever the topic of ending friendships over politics comes up: I’d never end a friendship over a disagreement about the ideal top marginal tax rate; I would end a friendship over a disagreement about a person’s right to exist.

This post’s featured photo by Maayan Nemanov on Unsplash.