[CarelessExpert]

> Keep your politics out of my computing and open source, please.

Open source started as a political movement.

Are you gonna ask me to keep the government out of your Medicare next? :)

(no, that's not an invitation to debate broader politics, it's just the first example that springs to mind)

[crad]

> Open source started as a political movement.

GNU is not the sole foundation of open source.

[CarelessExpert]

Do you really think Berkeley, of all places, working to make BSD available to the world for free, including excising all that proprietary AT&T code, wasn't engaging in a political act?

That the open source and hacking cultures of the 70s, 80s, and 90s weren't founded on an intentional rejection of the increasing balkanization of software and technology after the 1974 determination that software was copyrightable?

I understand, at an individual level, it might seem like throwing some code up on Github with a permissive license might not seem like a political act. But the history of open source is inseparable from the politics of intellectual property, copyright, and all those things that follow, including issues like the right to repair.

[crad]

I've been involved in open source for a long time (well before GitHub). My experience is that there are different groups with different motivations wrt open source.

As someone who has been in the "open source for the common good" camp, there seems to be a more extreme "open source as a religion" camp.

You're not off and have given me something to thing about.

FWIW Berkley wasn't immediately what I was thinking about, but I am more on the BSD vs GNU side of things.