[eesmith]

Free software is decidedly a political movement.

"open source" started in the 1990s, not as "an attempt to escape the clutches of proprietary and monopolistic companies like Microsoft and Apple" but as a way to make the source code part of the free software movement more palatable in proprietary and monopolistic companies like Microsoft and Apple.

And the GNU project started in 1983, before Microsoft or Apple had anything like their current influence. Apple didn't ship the first Macintosh until 1984, for example, and the Apple ][ opened computing domains far unlike the walled gardens outside of microcomputing.

If you go into open source to make the world a better place, then that's a political statement. Which might also explain why some open source programmers consider that open source development might not be the only way to make the world a better place.

There are of course other reasons that people go into open source. My statement is that there's no clear and obvious separation between the two.

[benjaminjosephw]

I think a lot of people read "political" as a synonym of "Partisan" and use that as a filter (or maybe excuse?) to not engage meaningfully with the content of the discussion.

Any activity related to changing or reinforcing the balance of power in a society is a political action as is any effort to prevent injustice. Free software is a movement to give more power to users and so is, by definition, a political movement