| "Software is political. It’s written by people, it’s used by people, and it has an impact on society. It is impossible for it to be neutral." If you take your definition of "political" to mean anything of utility made by people then yes, so it is. And everything else man made as well. You are not wrong in stating that everything has a political dimension, but as a general guideline it's non helpfull. Everything has some property in many analytical contexts. I would rather not think about for example the politics of daily consumables like milk and nails unless there is some milk related crisis going on. Or ponder on the metaphysics of gasoline while filling the tank. Software is just an utility like them. When it makes sense to observe spefic dimensions is when this observation has specific utility. Otherwise you are either a total nerd or a fanatic. Both of these stances are admirable, but not practical in the general sense. The link to the ruby library here is that the ruby library was totally unrelated to the political issue at hand in any possibly sane sense. If the ruby library was linked in some direct way to the political cause then taking it into account in relation to it would have made sense. In this case the links to the political cause were non-existant and the remotely familiar name was used as an excuse by attention seeking people who are too obsessed to do any action of real value. They satisfied their itch of "doing something" by an action that will NOT help the cause in ANY way. Perhaps it made the activists happy for a while but NOBODY else benefitted! See where this is going? Nerds/fanatics/impractical. |