When I see politics in software updates or documentation, nothing happens because I'm not looking to use the software for political activism. Maybe I tell my adblocker to remove the messaging, and carry on with my task.
I can engage with politics in a social context, when political messaging isn't interrupting something else I'm doing; that's a better place for activism, IMHO.
I almost always see activists using the argument that if I don't like the messaging then I'm part of the problem. Somehow I doubt that, given I don't mind messaging at all, where it's appropriate.
I see this as a bad analogy though: you wouldn't hear about it every time you go to the grocery store. Or, at the very least, you wouldn't stop and listen for the fifth time. You already know, and that's the point: the intention of most activism in technology (at least that I see) is to make you initially aware of it so you start to seek the information out and learn more elsewhere. (...And to give themselves good PR. We love rainbow capitalism /s)
Instagram and Twitter both get your attention during election season because they want you to be informed about how to vote. To me, that's a similar thing.
I considered the majority of the population to be affected by repeated messaging, messages in the background, or in other words availability bias. So the messaging be having the desired effect on society in general but not on some subset who filter it out completely.
http://iccf-holland.org/ http://www.vim.org/iccf/ http://www.iccf.nl/
You can also sponsor the development of Vim. Vim sponsors can vote for features. See |sponsor|. The money goes to Uganda anyway.
So, while I fully agree with your stance that banning political discourse is support for the status quo, I also think that it's reasonable to ask for it to be toned down a bit, especially when the politics and social issues of one country is basically drowning out everything else.
All that said, I'm talking mostly about HN or other community forums here. The owner of Notepad++ has the right to put whatever they want into their software, and if we're discussing that here on HN then it's an occasion where discussing politics is valid.
Political opinions about how things should be don't automatically dictate the actions that should be taken in support of those opinions. I can be mad about a law or a court decision and still have the good sense to, for example, not throw red paint on a lawmaker or judge.
Some behaviors just aren't helpful, and neither being right nor being upset changes that.
I don't want to either, and indeed I really want others to do it for me. As such, I really want to see even MORE political stuff like this to hopefully create folks who will actually protest and put their neck on the line.
Similar reason why US military propaganda is good. I never EVER want to be drafted and indeed if you put a gun in my hand and military fatigues on me, I will die with a shot in the ass (because I am running away). Thankfully, we have a bunch of hardened 20-somethings "manipulated" into joining the military and protecting us so that I can be lazy.
So please ratchet up the politics and get others out so I don't have to. It's not that hard to ignore yet another plea for help. We do it every hour of every day.
The politicisation of software is as harmful as requiring every research paper to be published with a political allegiance banner.
Software like most Sciences, Engineering, and, Trade is a much longer game for humanity than politics de jour.
It is easy to forget the extent of contributions from all sides of politics that has contributed to this trade, from Mohammed Algorithm to English, Russian, Chinese, and, everyone else to computing; but forgetting that and forging that for quick political hack points is a disservice to humanity.
I would argue that this has been an effective avenue for messaging/protest. You’re responding to it on this very board - that means you’re thinking about it.
Another angle: would such free protest be allowed if the developers of Notepad++ were based in China or Russia? I seriously doubt it.
Something similar, significantly different though, happen to a friend. They started distrusting the incogni.com after seeing their advertisements over and over again. To them they saw/felt/reasoned that only an untrustworthy actor would be pushing the messaging so much and a trustworthy actor would rely more on word of mouth via their good product inspiring people to speak up about them. I had to point out that they probably saw much more of incogni's advertising due to their rate and type of media consumption and most people probably do not get that level of exposure. If incogni lowered their advertisements to hit them correctly it would not be nearly enough advertising to reach the average consumer.
I see the frustration at the repeated messaging to likely be a natural protective mechanism. Instinctively reject repeated messages is not necessarily a bad instinct since manipulative people will use repeated messaging to manipulate, but repeated message exposure does not only happen due to an attempt to manipulate.
He who politicizes everything politicizes nothing.
Not really, software, like sciences and engineering must survive politics first. If humans start tossing around nukes like angry apes then those that survive may be scratching simple arithmetic with a charcoal stick on a cave wall.
Before I respond to your comment, allow me first to acknowledge the following injustices happening in the world:
* war in gaza
* war in ukraine
* civil war in sudan
* civil war in yemen
* civil war in myanmar
* ethnic violence in syria
* insurgent attacks in nigeria
* insurgent attacks in congo
* attacks on protesters in Iran
...
Wait, what's that? You don't want every comment to start with some sort of land acknowledgement-esque disclaimer of all injustices happening in the world? What are you, some sort of gaza war/ukraine war/sudanese civil war/ ... sympathizer? Tens, if not hundreds of millions have been affected by the event listed above, so at the very least you can spare a thought for them before discussing about some text editor getting compromised? You might argue acknowledging the war in gaza is beating a dead horse, but do you think the median HN reader has thought about the civil war in myanmar in the past month?
Additionally, it is based on a false notion that political banners in software helps in pursuing anyone let alone change political outcomes.
Freedom of speech is political.
The right to privacy is political.
Letting people on to the Internet without censorship is political.
Government policies that support startups are political.
Threatening to arrest teens for pirating mp3s is political.
> I can engage with politics in a social context, when political messaging isn't interrupting something else I'm doing; that's a better place for activism, IMHO.
For the people actually impacted by politics, reality rarely waits for a convenient time to interrupt.
Political reality tends to knock down doors and blow up buildings when it wants to really get someone's attention. "Don't bother me during my software updates" is a privileged position to be able to take.
I do not think it is uncommon for someone to do this, then see the side they oppose win more in elections, public perception, etc then decide to engage more and that is "why is there political messaging literally everywhere".
Since we can't remove it, the next best alternative is to participate and advocate for responsible political engagement. I think until we have some shared understanding of what responsible political engagement is we will continue to have it everywhere.
Being political isn’t a hobby you attend on Tuesdays, it’s real decision that affect people’s lives every single day, sometimes with deadly consequences.
- US arguing for independence of any of the States for whatever reasons?
- Spain for Catalonia?
- France for Basque?
and many more just in Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_separatist_move...
In the context of forums, the political threads are generally /not interesting/[0]. Political threads often devolve; they bring nothing 'new' or 'fresh' to the table, and they lead absolutely no where. It's a fart-in-the-wind situation no matter what your position is. Leave that stuff on reddit where the rest of the farts-in-the-wind go to waste. It's like watching commentators on Fox News or CNN or <insert favorite cable TV show here>. They're a large waste of time and they're often geared towards re-enforcing your side, aka echo chamber.
Now, if a thread actually evolved into real measurable action, that might actually be interesting. But that's not what happens on these forums. There's probably very few of us that see some HN thread talking about something awful happening somewhere and they take direct action, such as petitioning their government, protesting, etc. It's probably happened once or twice, but most of the farts in those threads just hang around and stink up the place.
Please stop stinking up HN.
Edit: I’ll also add that political messaging is highly contextual. What is appropriate and effective in one place may be counterproductive or actively harmful elsewhere. Format and tone actually matter if you care about your pet cause succeeding, believe it or not.
I think about a lot of things I do absolutely nothing about (or with).
Thinking about whatever messaging is here is like saying "thoughts and prayers". It means shit all nothing. The messaging was a waste of my time and your time. It was an ad for a product you'll never purchase.
> Yeah, Notepad++ is known for political messaging in their updates. Taiwan, Ukraine, etc.
If you’re calling Ukraine in particular a “separatist movement”, I don’t think we can have a productive conversation.
I don’t think I am the only one who has this reaction. People who do this should consider if it’s actually helping their cause. If not it’s just feelgood signaling, or possibly even counterproductive.
Notepad++ is free, open source software for which there are dozens of alternative packages of equivalent quality. The entire cost of using this software and benefiting from the work of the developer, is having to scroll past or close a few political opinions.
If the reaction, if someone vehemently dislikes this sort of thing, is to tell that developer to "just shut up and make your software" rather than to stop using that software? Then I think that's possibly the most entitled and hypocritical position that I think it's possible to have.
As problematic as the assertion "by definition" is aside, it should be noted that endlessly commenting about politics on internet forums effectively changes nothing.
I've been kettled by mounted officers and hit by high pressure hoses on cold evenings, something that also rarely effects change .. but that's a least a fun night out with people and better than wasting bits on the intertubes.
Your comment is a good example of it; who is dictator? The people who hacked the software or the political pole they support? At what point did they become fascist enough to warrant politicalisation of everything ?
How do they know it was a Chinese group or even a state sponsored one?
The good sense is your judgement. At some point a real, direct, disruptive protest is going to be the right solution for a big enough group of people. Peaceful protests are just a "we're starting to get there" signal. It's not like politicians normally say "gee, lots of people don't like how I abuse power, I guess I'll stop now". It's all about being collectively upset enough about status quo.
Further, political banners in software have absolute helped, and have changed political outcomes. As an example of that, SOPA, and later PIPA, were defeated by websites such as Wikipedia (which are software) putting banners aimed at informing the public of those bills.
But if I were a nihilist I might agree with you.
So what about protesting the Russian invasion of Ukraine seems objectionable to you?
> it is fair to say that Notepad++’s freedom to protest would depend on who and what they are protesting.
What? In the US, UK, and Australia, the right to protest (i.e. of speech) does not depend on what’s being protested in the way you’re implying.
I view these kinds of weird virtue signaling political statements on things like software to be the same. They do absolutely nothing and are just visual noise for nothing. Actually, this is a good example of where it can go wrong as it likely made the software the target of Chinese state-sponsored actors. So not only does it serve no useful purpose, it also can make you a target and piss people off.
This is the entire point and objection with politicisation of everything.
Try to point out to a democrat that Trump is doing something right or to a Trump voter that Biden did something right. Most of them can’t accept that. The “other” side has to all bad. I don’t see this to such an extreme in other countries I know like Germany or Spain.
It's okay to watch a show about knights and demons and enjoy it. It's okay to use a piece of software that doesn't code every release as a protest against something. Instead of judging other people for not burning out, maybe take a break yourself. It's okay and normal.
apparently, it's OK to have this stance of "if you're not with us, you're against us".
It's absolutely possible to not want political discussions in various places - it doesn't mean you support one or the other side. It simply means you don't want that discussion here. You could support the incumbents or not - not wanting the discussion does not imply support for the incumbents.
Unfortunately, US politics also drives tech issues elsewhere like the EU. For example, local data control is a big thing that some of us have been screaming about forever but nobody paid attention to--until US politics made it a hot button issue.
And, to be honest, if the EU would get off its ass and at least try to foster some alternatives, even those of us in the US would benefit. EU alternatives would mean that people in the US could finally vote against the megajillionaires with their wallets.
> Americans, including people here, seem uniquely incapable of nuance in their thinking when it comes to politics.
Bullets and beatings don't leave much room for nuance regardless of country.
If in another country I vote for these guys or sometimes those other guys, and once this little party that got a seat, but not really those ones, and I really hate these ones, then your "political identity" already has a lot of nuance. In Australia with preferencial voting, a single vote has a lot of naunce.
What can you get in America? Green Party supportors who "strategically" vote for a democrat? Not much else...
I don’t agree with them and I don’t think they should be in my software, or dealing with anything they don’t understand (for instance crime, homeless people, geopolitics, or really anything outside of overpriced vegan coffee shops). All they really do is end up getting Fox News people to vote for fascists like Trump out of spite
could you remind me what country is the afd based out of thnx
You can’t be against the Ukraine war in Russia because Putin is an evil dictator
There is such a thing as being able to act and think in ways that aren't political in nature. Maybe not for you, but it absolutely is possible.
By all means make a considered and thoughtful point, please.
When I care about politics I’ll deal with actual politics. Reddit won’t change my mind nor the world.
Yes, yes, and yes again.
> Many activists would certainly have you think otherwise. As far as I can tell, fighting that habit is a huge goal of activism.
That's their problem. As soon as you start contributing to them, you will not pursue your own goals, living your own life, but those imposed by activists or their supervisors.
It's convenient for them, you give them a political resource. But why do you need it?
Politics are quite literally life-or-death for many people. War is politics. Access to healthcare is politics. Economic policy that determines whether businesses and careers succeed or fail is politics. Freedom to say what you want, believe or not believe in whatever religion you want, and be who you are without being imprisoned is politics. The people who make the most noise about politics are the people who are literally dying for as long as the rest of society ignores their plight.
If this isn't the case for you, it's because you benefit from the status quo. It is the definition of privilege to be able to "ignore politics". That means you are currently benefitting from politics. Of course you don't want to hear about politics, politics are doing just fine for you. And the comment you were asking to was asking you to reflect on that: if the biggest problem gracing you is hearing other people make noise about circumstances, the least you could do is deal with it. Your problems are trivial if that is what gets you upset. Other people are complaining about things that affect the outcome of their lives and you're complaining about... having to hear it.
You know that's official position of 99% countries in the world, including all superpowers and every NATO member?
No, it explicitly is not, and this "deepity" doesn't change any rational analysis. The injection of politics into every aspect of society must and should be refused.
Activism can be annoying, but it's never pointless (not even when it fails to be effective).
> All they really do is end up getting Fox News people to vote for fascists like Trump out of spite
It wouldn't be worthwhile for activists to resign themselves to inaction out of fear of offending the "Fox news people". "Fox news people" are already more likely than not to vote for fascists like Trump, and they'll use any excuse/justification they're being fed including "I don't like the way the wrong people are using their freedom to protest the wrong things".
I read about politics all day long in many different places. My belief that HN should be relatively free of such stories is not because I believe I can detach myself from politics, but because I believe topic based forums are more valuable and useful than “anything goes” forums.
Activists wanting something is not synonymous with that thing being a good idea. It just means that someone wants something out of you could be good, could be very bad. No different than a sales person trying to get you to buy something.
As one should, I avoid stuff that have a very loud fascist author/owner. So we should be happy for this people to show what they believe in, this way we can decide not to help fascists(and others can decide to support them and not to help one of the other sides)
99% countries, as they say, "acknowledge China's viewpoint".
Politics is a game. It is played with one single objective: to make sure that the people with no political power remain fighting among themselves instead of fighting those with power. If you believe some favored political faction will solve these problems you mention, then it is you who is missing the entire point.
Free Software is inherently political. It’s like ordering a cheeseburger and being shocked that it has meat in it.
> How the produce of society is distributed and how people are cared for has zero relevance to an article about hacking a text editor,
The article is political. People make noise about Taiwan because an invasion of Taiwan would kill many and oppress more, in other words because it, like all political matters, is something that determines the course of lives of millions. Even if they are not directly affected, noise about politics escalates as a mechanism for people to protect themselves. When you are at the wrong end of a group that outnumbers you trying to kill you, you will require the aid of others. But will others come to your aid if you were not willing to come to their aid? This is how the concept of a "conscience" and "empathy" evolved -- because they give an evolutionary advantage, of providing for your own survival by ensuring collective survival.
Edit: for posterity, the comment I was replying to mentioned a "belief in either team leading you to the promised land", which has been edited out.
In reality it is not. It is a spectrum of parties. People vote often for smaller parties in the state and larger ones in the national.
You seem very angry at a stranger on the internet. I think a break from thinking about everything through the lens of politics might be good for you.
If this is true, I'd like to know what a weak political view is instead!
Access to water is political. If you get water from the city, the building of infrastructure delivering water to your residence is political. Whether or not that water is polluted is political. If you get your water from a well on your own property, your ownership of that land is political. None of that is achieved without group consensus, and group consensus can take all of it away from you. You are able to ignore that fact because all of those political consensuses are currently going in your favor, but the same is not true for everyone, and when it isn't true for them, they can be predicted to make noise about not having access to water for obvious reasons. They will make noise about it everywhere they can because it will be more important than anything else to them, given that it will determine whether they live or die and they need to galvanize communal support in order to reverse their fortunes.
> You seem very angry at a stranger on the internet. I think a break from thinking about everything through the lens of politics might be good for you.
My previous comment was written entirely neutrally, so I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion. Incidentally, I happen to live in a prosperous and stable society that I have confidence will remain secure for decades to come, so I have the privilege to ignore politics at my leisure. I am grateful for that opportunity, but I also understand how much of a privilege it is that politics are going well and not actively creating problems for me, so when other people complain about political processes creating problems for them, like the threatened invasion of their country, I listen without complaining.
I took HN as a place for rational discussion, so I made an effort to communicate to you why politics are so important to many, but in the end it seems this discussion is fruitless. If there is any emotion I feel, it is that of disappointment for wasting my time trying to discuss things logically and rather than being met with any kind of reasoned rebuttal, I get a childish dismissal the likes of which I could've gotten on Reddit, which I stopped using for that very reason a decade ago.
If tomorrow there would be a war or protests in, say, Burundi. Will Americans stay with Burundi or against it? Or with the country the media will tell them is "good" because their interests align with US interests?
I think answers to all these questions are obvious.
>A majority of countries (119 or 62 per cent of UN member states) have endorsed Beijing’s one-China principle, which entails that Taiwan is an inalienable part of the People’s Republic of China.
I was being generous bucketing 20 mixed signallers with 40 status quoist. 120 agree TW inalienable part of China, as in TW can never be independent from one China construct (PRC's position). 20 agree it's part of China but not necessarily inalienable, i.e. TW/ROC should have pathway to independence but until they formalize, still part of China. AKA 75% is in recognize tier.
It has been like that since forever. They don't know how a left leaning party looks.
What exactly do you want the EU, the Brussels based institution, to do here? Because AWS didn't come into existence because Uncle sam came in and twisted Bezo's hand telling him to invent a hyperscaler that will conquer the world.
EU's lack of comparable domestic alternatives is a consequence of the failure of its entrepreneurship and free market in the SW private sector, and nothing that EU institution can do about it to magically fix this since the solution is not MORE regulatory interference form government bureaucrats who don't know how the internet works.
You might be able to force innovation if the governments can throw money at the problem if the VC sector is lacking, but they can't force economies of scale and mass adoption without a China style great firewall, in which case you'd then have even bigger issues.
1. I don't want to see political messages in unrelated delivery mechanisms
and
2. I created $PRODUCT as a delivery mechanism for a political message
are equally valid.
I feel that the problem that comes about is when a $PRODUCT was not created as a delivery mechanism but is being co-opted into being one at some later stage; the audience feels deceived and the creator feels that the audience is ungrateful.
I'm not very familiar with Notepad++ (having never used it, nor experienced any desire to try it), but I'm fairly certain that the creator has been political long enough now that the audience cannot complain about the message being delivered with the product.
It's like complaining about Vim having a message for the plight of Ugandans - it's been there for decades; too late to complain now about it.
I'm more sympathetic to complaints over projects which never had a specific political message suddenly acquiring one when they realised what a large audience they had, or when new people join a decades-old project and introduce a political message that was never there before. I can sorta understand outrage then.
When last we crossed you appeared to be lecturing people while incorrectly paraphrasing their actual position (aka strawmanning)( >>46793399 ).
FWiW I recall handing a guitar (I hear they kill facists) to Billy Bragg way back when he was on tour Talking to the Taxman About Poetry and FYI he's back, again, following Springsteen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKOW2ZikGW8
So, good luck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ2QOwQdHL8
Maybe sidestep becoming a parody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1_uEbGJtnY
When you launch a plain nvim instance you get the following:
> Help poor children in Uganda!
> type :help Kuwasha<Enter> for information
Articles about families living close by, which water bills exploded recently?
On the other hand, you don't see commenters saying that they are indifferent to their access to water, and that they are tired seeing others being engaged in the conversation.
If it's not impacting you, I don't blame you not participating. But I feel (general) you don't get to push down on others because they are discussing important topics (to them).
Capitalists can also start software businesses and sell their software, but those are all in Silicon Valley because the money is there because the US has a privileged financial position.
Feels like this is overstating the facts. Afaik, twice did the author on N++ did include a small political message in a release.
Is it really "whenever"? Blowing this out of proportions because some are so allergic to any political message that twice in 10 years is being pushy..
In the end, everything involving more than 2 humans is politics. You may want to ignore some topics, but those may be important to others. Until the day you yourself want to bring some attention but you're met with an "apolitical" response saying it's not the time or place for it.
They are making a mistake I was never political!
Conveniently, it's never here, and it's never now. I think MLK Junior wrote a speech about this? Letter from a Birmingham Jail: https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....
Everyone, including 99% of the world's politicians that don't have their heads up their asses, including the ones who wrote the official positions that Taiwan is not a country, knows Taiwan is a country.
> People will tell me again to not mix politics with software/business. Doing so surely impacts the popularity of Notepad++: talking about politics is exactly what software and commercial companies generally try to avoid. The problem is, if we don’t deal with politics, politics will deal with us. We can choose to not act when people are being oppressed, but when it’s our turn to be oppressed, it will be too late and there will be no one for us. You don’t need to be Uyghur or a Muslim to act, you need only to be a human and have empathy for our fellow humans.
HN discussions are usually very high quality and respectful disagreement therein, which is unique online nowadays.
I’ve come here to escape Reddit, which is all politics all the time. If this place turns as political as Reddit, I’m out.
I find this take deeply ironic.
And here due to alleged political take of some software (Notepad++), __state sponsored software__ was used to attack users of said software. Something actually happened!
You don't want to see politics in any software, but may be (or already are) a victim of political software attack (from state sponsored tracking, to sanctions, to political psy-ops through software distributing (social) media).
> <...> Maybe I tell my adblocker to remove the messaging, and carry on with my task. > > I can engage with politics in a social context, when political messaging isn't interrupting something else I'm doing; that's a better place for activism, IMHO.
You are clearly annoyed by ads, like many of us - maybe you should get public attention to change policy about ads? How they are annoying? How there are unskippable Ads in TV services that I pay money for? How there are big enterprises using their monopoly/oligopoly powers to make you stop being able to adblock ever again? Or do you only block ads you deem "political"?
_______
States (and not only them) will use software and even open source software (open source IMHO is also a political take/view) to get to you if it's ever needed. Though congrats you just got extra social credits in __both__: China's and Palantir's databases!
- Ukraine for Donbas
Which is so much weaker than all others. There are Ukrainians, Russians, Chinese, Tibetans. But there is no such ethnicity as People of Donbas.
OTOH in a democratic state you're still have the right to demonstrate peacefully for whatever you want, even if it doesn't make much sense. But would you allowed to demonstrate in Ukraine for Donbas independence if they are considered separatists according to the law?
"Say" in the sense of demonstrate peacefully for this? Then I'm impressed. If someone else can confirm this? Is this because of USA being a federal union? Before Ukraine declared independence, there were voices to make Ukraine a federal state, so that people in the West part of Ukraine can live their way of life and people living 1600 km (!) away in the East and Southern parts would be not much affected from that and vice versa. Voices for the unitary state were stronger because of stability of the state. Would be interesting to see some documentary "what if", whether a federal state would be more stable against pulling from the west (Europe, US) and the east (Russia).
I was glad after discovering [1]. In one of the videos the interviewer explains, why he was not arrested. The channel is for English-speaking auditory outside of Russia. It was enough to "close eyes" for some openly expressed critiques. Though it was painfully to listen to some people who were not against the war.
Not only does politics and general stories crowd out everything else over time on other sites, there are HN submitters who seem to be trying to accelerate this.
During the war, when HN was getting Israel-Palestine stories constantly, I started looking at the submission history of some of the submitters, and some of them were just pushing these types of stories every day for months and months.
So yes, I think allowing politics will eventually mean being dominated by politics and general interest.
I mean, yeah. Most major social media services used in the West are based in the US. The single largest English as a first language population is in the United States.
Given how many users from outside the US are oft wont to opine on our state of affairs even during the good times - often without even being asked - I like to think they'll endure our discourse.
If HN is going to allow accusations to be slung against groups of people it has to allow others to respond, and that sets off endless debate amongst people who will not be changing their minds on the matter but will repeat the same argument on the next post.
You are falling for Russian propaganda about evil western-Ukrainian nazis attempting to enslave peaceful-Russian-speaking-peoples-of-Donbass-or-whatever who were just minding their own business ("way of life"). As a Russian-speaking Ukrainian neither do I want Putin to protect me (apparently by looting my apartment and raping my girlfriend or in whichever way he is trying to do it these days), nor do absolute majority of population of, say, Kharkiv, Odesa or Kherson.
> Voices for the unitary state were stronger because of stability of the state. Would be interesting to see some documentary "what if", whether a federal state would be more stable against pulling from the west (Europe, US) and the east (Russia).
As a Ukrainian I find that idea quite laughable. It is not really possible for a part of federal union (say a state of USA or a Swiss canton) to join NATO and for other part to "decide" to become a Russian-occupied quasi-state like Belarus. Same goes for a part of it joining EU while some other part decides it wants to be part of EAEU Customs Union. State's foreign affairs are still decided by some central government.
Also, you can research how great "deciding on their own way of life" works in Russian Federation. You could start with first and second Chechen Wars.
The same with politics. When politicians keep their hands off the society, no one feels pressed to talk about politics. When an authoritarian regime compromises a widely used open source software to conduct espionage, of course people will start talking about politics.
No one has the time to pay attention to every little injustice in the world. For all the people crying about Gaza, how many of them are dedicating as much energy to the wars in Sudan, Yemen, or Myanmar, or the abuses by Russian security services (like imprisoning a guy for holding up a blank card)? This isn't to say that we should just ignore Gaza or Ukraine or ICE in the US, but we need to make a choice: either we spend ALL our energy addressing every injustice in the world, until there is no more injustice left (and this means we need to stop everything else we're doing now, including keeping society running, making food, etc.), or we need to choose when and how much attention we'll devote to various issues.
Well, gee, let's look at the sponsorship page for KiCad: https://www.kicad.org/sponsors/sponsors/
I see a couple EU companies, but no EU governments. It takes a paltry $15K to be a Platinum sponsor.
I picked KiCad because PCB design is critical military infrastructure, the alternative programs are almost all under non-EU jurisdictions and could be pulled, and KiCad is both open source and local desktop to top it all off. This is exactly the kind of quiet, unflashy toil that desperately needs support from a government entity.
Lots of areas need support for open source alternatives that are controlled by proprietary software that might vaporize. I picked PCB design because it's an easy target. Cadence and Synopsys have locks on VLSI design domains that could get yanked from the EU. VHDL tooling is still disastrously poor. Everybody could use an alternative 3D modeling kernel (the EU is a little better here because the dominant proprietary kernels are from Dassault Systèmes and Siemens). I'm sticking to software as the domain because the purpose of the funding is obvious (pay developers, duh), but it also applies to things like small manufacturing and maintaining domestic supply chains (but the purpose and focus becomes a lot messier).
And yet, everywhere I look, any project I pick, crickets.
I don't expect the EU to front run, but something like KiCad is 3 bloody decades old.
> those are all in Silicon Valley because the money is there because the US has a privileged financial position.
And yet you had the rise of Akihabara as an electronic parts mecca which then later got eclipsed by Shenzhen. And that's not even talking about the fact that the modern computing sits atop a mountain of stuff developed out of the VLSI Project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLSI_Project).
All of those occurred because their respective governments threw money around.
Sure, maybe you won't create another Silicon Valley hare, but, perhaps, just perhaps, you might create a relentless, open source EU tortoise that slowly displaces the proprietary software. The EU is good at slow--relentless, not so much.
Sadly, a continual state of inertia and sclerosis and failure around tech seems to be historically European: https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/the-eurochip/
For example it's very normal for the Tor project to talk about censorship and privacy. It's also fairly normal for Russian maintainers to speak out about how it's no longer possible for them to receive support due to sanctions. And I can understand if a Ukrainian maintainer has to focus on trying to survive or escape the country instead of developing their software. All of that stuff is completely fine and I wholly empathize with it. It doesn't bother me because it's not extraneous; it is directly relevant to the project. I also don't mind projects listing their preferred charities.
But I do roll my eyes when projects continue to pine on about Taiwan's independence or the genocides in Gaza. If there isn't a reason why it's actually relevant to the project, I don't think the project page is a good space to push it.
There are already alternatives to KiCad for PCBs. And I repeat myself: NLNET can only rule on the proposals it receives. Have you proposed to spend a year improving the KiCad UX?
our enemy. It must be Chinese, North Korean or Russian.
> state sponsored one
"our software/our provider is so good that only a state actor can compromise us" (see Microsoft's AD keys hack for details)
we are just sick of propaganda. And of pissing contests. And of "mine is longer than yours" content.
How attention works, whether training on scraped data is legal, and whether or not the latter should be permissible are three distinct topics. Only the third is inherently political. The second has a close relation to politics but is ultimately a legal question as opposed to a political contest. The first has absolutely nothing to do with politics in and of itself.
> politics pervades everything
That's exactly the problem. Sometimes I don't want it to. If I pull up a spec sheet for a microcontroller I don't want to be bombarded with propaganda pertaining to the political tug of war of the day.
The fact that mundane actions can have political impacts when considered en masse does not imply that we can't or shouldn't have spaces for discussions that are reasonably free of political topics. It isn't always appropriate (imo) to discuss the political impacts of the task at hand. It's okay to have a space in which only the task itself is permitted.
Microcontroller is a broad category of electronic components. Maximum I/O current is orthogonal to microcontroller. Spec language is orthogonal to microcontroller. Politics is orthogonal to microcontroller, and orthogonal to maximum I/O current. The letter "x" is orthogonal to all of the above.
If we make a category of microcontrollers with French data sheets, we are intersecting two axes. That's analogous to vegetables that contain saturated fat or vegetables that begin with the letter "a" in Flemish.
Saturated fats pervade foods (but not all of them), the Flemish letter "a" pervades foods (but only 1/26 of them), electrical concepts pervade microcontroller spec sheets (all microcontrollers, but not all documents describing them) and politics pervades everything (some exceptions here too?)
What activism was that? Were there sit-ins? Millions marching in the streets? Were trans people chaining themselves to bathrooms? What was the terrible activism so extreme that it pushed "fox news people" into voting for an R when they'd normally vote for a D? My guess is that there are effectively 0 "fox news people" who'd ever vote for a D to start with and that fox news watchers didn't actually see or experience much activism on the transgender issue. Instead what they mostly had a problem with was policy put in place by non-transgendered people, library books that included transgender characters, and the existence of trans people generally. No activism needed.
I don't agree. Even if proprietary software is somehow "better" (and I don't concede that automatically), proprietary software is always at the risk of disappearing--see: VMWare after the Broadcom purchase. Your critical software being open source means that you have the right to fork/copy and just keep going without needing to do anything else. Proprietary software disappearing means that you need to file legal paperwork and get a judge to care and then wrench the source code out of someone's hands.
The failure modes are vastly different.
And this is before we get into the whole undocumented, proprietary storage formats issue.
> Have you proposed to spend a year improving the KiCad UX?
I am in the US. Can a US citizen propose that? I would assume that this has to come from EU citizens, no?
To be honest, if I could get KiCad some funding simply by filing some paperwork, that's probably a good investment of time.
> There are already alternatives to KiCad for PCBs.
Not really. Autodesk bought Eagle. Renesas bought Altium. Cadence bought Orcad. There's a whole host of stuff controlled by China. Most of the other free things aren't even close to KiCad.
I guess maybe PADS, since it's owned by Siemens? But I haven't bumped into a PADS user in a very long time--I wonder if it's considered legacy or just far too expensive.
Safe for regular person, but socially risky: "We should surrender and pay reparations" "This war is totally Putin'a fault" "Putin is corrupt dictator" "Zelensky is a good guy"
Could in theory lead to a fine and/or losing job, but mostly safe: "I support Navalny", donation to ACF or some kind of western-affiliated NGO.
Could lead to a fine and/or prison time, when it done in social media or on the square: "Slava Ukraine", Butcha fakes, Let's willingly donate to Ukraine war effort, etc
We definitely do not agree on that point. I mean sure, I can imagine a scenario where a company chooses not to publish in a particular language for a political reason. But I do not believe that is typically the case.
If I pull up a Japanese ActivityPub node and notice that the people there are posting in Japanese (not English!) is that political? I don't see how. They're using the language that is convenient for them in that context. So too a Chinese outfit publishing documentation in Chinese for a chip they only ever intended to sell domestically. Or perhaps they fully intended to export it but decided to cut costs by not bothering to translate the documentation. Cutting costs is a universal pressure that transcends all boundaries. Working in one's native language doesn't seem even remotely politically charged to me.
> If we make a category of microcontrollers with French data sheets, we are intersecting two axes. That's analogous to vegetables that contain saturated fat or vegetables that begin with the letter "a" in Flemish.
The point of my original analogy (that I feel still stands) is that wanting to categorize something for some purpose is not necessarily political in nature. Sure, it could be motivated by such. But it doesn't have to be. Perhaps you have a legitimate reason to want to sort your vegetables by fat content. It doesn't have to be political (though it certainly can be).
It follows that me not wanting political conversations in a certain venue is not necessarily a politically motivated position in and of itself. It could be (my intention could be to manipulate the discourse for a political purpose) but it doesn't have to be.
> politics pervades everything (some exceptions here too?)
Politics influence the vast majority of human activity almost by definition. It doesn't follow that everything is political. Words are intended to mean things. If "everything is A" then what is the point of A as a category? Obviously categories are only useful to the extent that they exclude things.