Every week veteran KDE contributor Kevin Ottens posts a bunch of thought-provoking links on his blog, and last week’s post contained one that I found particularly enlightening:
Great post but I have to add if this is difficult for you record your notes. I have a few literacy issues (found out when I went to TAFE I had form of dyslexia) and this helped me heaps to learn how to write in a way my brain understands and that others can read.
This from that link was mad to read
I have nearly forty years of programming experience, thirty of it working full time. I have code running on billions of devices, on all continents, on all oceans, in orbit, and on Mars.
That should make it a bit easier to read.
Cheers for doing that
It’s really funny how people get triggered and react aggressively when they read that writing software has a political dimension. Acting like politicians aren’t already selectively deciding on using one software over the other solely for political reasons.
I wish I could say anything close to that. But given that most of my code was written on Dec PDP 11/70s (BASIC 2+) and WANG Minis (COBOL), and none of my Web code, written in Visual Basic and C# is currently running, my 30 years of working full time might never have happened. 
I know, it seems a bit weird to me too. But I think it happens because a lot of people don’t actually understand what politics is: a decision-making process regarding the distribution of power in society. Anything that increases or decreases the amount of power that any person or group has is therefore political. And this includes software, as well as lots of other things: tools in general, education, vehicles, weapons–you name it. Yes, this means that politics is very broad!
That conclusion is depressing to a lot of people who associate politics with negative things: oppression, censorship, disenfranchisement, one group forcing its desires on another one, etc.
And if you live in a place with a broken political system where people use the process as a club to bonk each other on the head, or where one evil man controls everything, then yes, this means things that are political become very bad very quickly. But this is a failure of the system, and fixing that or else leaving and finding a better political system to live under kind of becomes a priority 1 thing IMO. Because if the political system of your society doesn’t work tolerably, the result will never cease to be misery and ruination on many levels, and if you ever do anything the government doesn’t want, you’ll be risking death, starvation, torture, etc. And yes, this includes using or developing software your government doesn’t approve of, or bypassing the software they want everyone to use. Hence, the software is political. Always has been.
But I think it happens because a lot of people don’t actually understand what politics is
That conclusion is depressing to a lot of people who associate politics with negative things: oppression, censorship, disenfranchisement, one group forcing its desires on another one, etc.
Yes, I think those are most likely some of the reasons in this case. The other reason I see is that people simply tell everyone to shut up with politics of whom they think might stand for a world view that would contradict their personal reality. Like the first commenter who put forth the meme argument that the daring guidelines in our Code of Conduct like “Be considerate”, “Be respectful” or “We do not tolerate […] any form of discrimination.” are limiting “free speech”.
And if you live in a place with a broken political system
That’s every place to some extent AFAIK. ^^ But of course some are worse than others.
Oh, I have a nice German word for you which I think you might enjoy: Politikverdrossenheit
“verdrossen” is already IMO a nice word without an English equivalent AFAIK. It is kind of the state one is in after being wildly annoyed by something and once one has accepted that something is as it is and one doesn’t want to deal with or think about it anymore.
“Politik-verdrossen-heit” is therefore the term for when people have given up on contributing constructively to politics entirely because they don’t feel represented by any politicians and no longer think that anything they do will have any effect worth their time.
We do however have a party even for the Politikverdrossenen among us: The satirical party called literally “The PARTY” with many humoristic goals they “stand for”. They get something like 1% of votes and have one seat in the European parliament currently. I don’t really think it is a good idea to vote for them, but still it’s nice that the people who only want to make fun of the absurdity that politics sometimes is have a party they can vote for.
“Politikverdrossenheit!” Ich liebe dieser Word!
Yeah, I think burnout on politics is a part of it too. At least in the USA, a whole generation has come of age during a time when politicians seemed unable to address the important issues of the day, or were even causing them or making them worse.
Of course my opinion is that only some politicians did this, and their explicit goal was to paint the entire profession as rotten to burn people out on the concept of political engagement, which would make life easier for them to use their positions to funnel money and power to their friends. So the solution IMMO is not to become disengaged but rather to become more engaged and advocate and vote against the slimeballs doing this.
But that’s pretty off-topic. Funny how everyone wanted to pounce on this topic and not “write better commit messages!” 
Well said, though the said politicians are only part of the problem.