Politics is everywhere… and I hate it

Firstly, this post is not going out on a Tuesday, as they usually do. That’s on purpose. Partly.

The truth is that I wanted to cover this before, but I also promised I would never touch on politics on my blog. So since this will be an exception, let’s also make it an exception in the day it goes out.

Breaking my own rule

The reason why I didn’t want to cover politics in the first place is because politics, just like religion and even sports teams, are usually binary things for people. Meaning, you are either with me or against me, with nothing in between.

That makes it a very hard subject to discuss because you will make enemies—usually more than allies. Have you ever tried discussing your favorite sports team with someone else’s? It rarely goes well, and the same goes for religion. Politics is no different.

But I don’t care about politics specifically, just like I don’t care about sports teams. What I do care about is when politics get in the way of something I care about.

When politics meets software

Take DHH for example. He’s well known in the development world, not just for his opinions, but for what he has built. He’s behind Ruby on Rails, has written books like Rework and Remote, and more recently has presented us with a Linux distro called Omarchy.

Now, if you’ve been following my recent posts, you know I moved from macOS to Linux—specifically, Omarchy.

Does that mean I agree with everything DHH says? No. Does that mean we align politically? Probably not. And that’s fine.

The Framework controversy

Since I’m no longer using macOS, I needed a new machine, and I ended up going with Framework. It felt like the perfect match: modular, repairable, and aligned with how I want to use my computer.

Framework, like they do with other distros and organizations, decided to support Omarchy financially.

Now here’s where things get weird. Some people took that as a political statement, as if Framework was aligning itself with DHH’s personal views.

From my point of view, that doesn’t make sense. Framework is a hardware company, and their hardware needs operating systems. DHH happens to use their devices and can validate that Omarchy runs well on them.

That’s it. There’s no need to jump from “they support a distro” to “they share political beliefs”. In the business world, this is just two parts that complement each other.

But not everyone sees it that way, and stories like this one covering the controversy around Framework, Hyprland, Omarchy and DHH personally have spun up a lot of words that shouldn’t have been written in the first place.

GNOME, Fedora, and perception

On the other side, I’ve also been using Fedora on an old 11" MacBook Air I had lying around. It gave that machine a second life. Wi-Fi took a bit of effort, but it works, and overall it’s been a great experience.

Fedora uses the GNOME desktop environment, and GNOME is interesting here—not because of what it does technically, but because of how it’s perceived. There’s a growing feeling in parts of the community that GNOME leans strongly in a particular cultural or political direction, whether that’s fair or not.

Some contributors are openly vocal about their views, and that’s fine. People can believe whatever they want. The problem starts when people begin to feel like those views are influencing the project itself. At that point, it stops being just software, and for some users, that’s enough to push them away.

XLibre and where lines get drawn

Around the same time, another situation started to unfold—this time around the graphics stack.

XLibre is a fork of X.Org, the long-standing display server used across Linux systems.

Forks are nothing new in open source. They happen all the time, usually because people want to try something different, move faster, or take a project in a new direction.

But what stood out here wasn’t just the fork itself. There were claims and discussions in the community that XLibre wasn’t being accepted into distributions like Debian—not purely on technical grounds, but because of disagreements with the people behind it and what they represent.

Take this discussion, for example. The author clearly mentions he is not after a technical discussion, but rather focused on addressing accusations and personal conduct surrounding the people involved.

Whether that’s entirely accurate or not is hard to pin down from the outside, but the perception alone was enough to spark debate. And that’s the interesting part.

Once decisions start being interpreted through a political lens—even if they weren’t originally made that way—it changes how people react to them. Instead of “is this good software?”, the question becomes “do we agree with who made it?”

And when that shift happens, it’s no longer just about building better tools. It’s about drawing lines.

Keep the work, work

A few years ago, 37signals (the company behind Basecamp, led by Jason Fried and DHH himself) made a decision: politics would stay out of the workplace, with no political discussions internally and a clear focus on the work.

Honestly, that makes a lot of sense to me. I would even extend that to religion and sports, because anything that naturally creates division doesn’t really help a team move forward.

Work should be about building things together, not picking sides, and I’m surprised more companies didn’t follow that approach.

These days, it often feels like you’re expected to take a stance on everything, but what if you’re just not interested in playing that game? What if you just don’t care enough to know which side to pick?

When things get serious

Then there are cases where politics doesn’t just leak in—it crashes through the door.

The XZ Utils incident is a perfect example.

In early 2024, a backdoor was discovered in XZ Utils, a widely used compression library in Linux systems. The attacker had spent years building trust in the project before introducing malicious code that targeted SSH authentication, and the vulnerability was caught just in time before widespread damage.

You can read a technical breakdown by the developer who caught this vulnerability and be impressed just like I was.

What followed wasn’t just a security discussion—it quickly turned into questions about identity, origin, and whether this could have been backed by a nation-state.

This is no longer just about code.

What makes this situation even more unsettling is how long it took to unfold. The attacker didn’t just show up and drop malicious code—this was a multi-year effort where trust was built slowly through legitimate contributions, eventually leading to a position of influence within the project.

By the time the backdoor was introduced, they weren’t an outsider anymore—they were trusted. That alone suggests a level of patience and coordination that goes far beyond a typical “lone hacker” scenario.

There are also small details that made people raise eyebrows. Commit timing patterns didn’t always line up with what you’d expect—even considering the contributor’s claimed background—and some activity appeared during periods that would normally be holidays in China, which led to speculation about whether more than one person might have been involved.

Then there’s the cost. Maintaining a presence in a critical open source project for years, building credibility, and carefully crafting an attack like this isn’t cheap—in time or resources.

And that’s where the conversation shifts again, because at that point it’s no longer unreasonable to ask whether this was just an individual… or something more organized.

Regulation reaching the operating system

More recently, there’s been movement around age verification laws in places like parts of the US and countries like Brazil. For example, discussions around age verification expansion in the US can be read here.

The idea is simple on paper: protect minors online, but the scope is expanding, and it’s not necessarily just about minors anymore.

It’s no longer just about websites. This has already started reaching the operating system level, with real implementations beginning to appear.

Let me put that clearly: any operating system will be affected, including Linux.

Even if there are loopholes in the regulation—like someone setting up a device for someone else—the direction is clear, and it raises some uncomfortable questions.

Linux has always been about freedom. You install it, you use it, no questions asked.

For reference, the GNU General Public License (GPL) is a free software license that guarantees the freedom to use, study, modify, and share software, while requiring any distributed changes to remain under the same license.

Introducing identity checks at that level changes the nature of the system itself.

When I was younger, I learned a lot about computers by just exploring. I had no idea what I was doing, but I had access, and that freedom is the reason I ended up working in tech.

Yes, the internet today is more dangerous than it used to be, but it’s also more important than ever. Just like the streets are dangerous, we don’t put guardrails everywhere—the responsibility falls on parents, not governments.

Where this could go

This kind of regulation opens a door.

Maybe today it’s just age verification. But what comes next?

What if access to a computer requires proof of identity? What happens to servers, self-hosted systems, or experimentation?

We’re talking about infrastructure that runs the world, and suddenly it’s not just about what you can build—but whether you’re allowed to.

Final thoughts

I never cared much about politics, and I still don’t, but I do care about the tools I use—and it’s getting harder to separate one from the other.

What used to feel like neutral ground now comes with baggage, not because the tools changed, but because everything around them did.

At the end of the day, I’m not looking to pick a side. I just want to use what works for me without having to think about anything else.

I just hope we don’t lose sight of why we’re here in the first place—to build useful things, learn from each other, and move forward together instead of getting stuck in fights that don’t really lead anywhere.