I don’t know what we as a community are going to do, but personally, as a NixOS maintainer, I will not spend an ounce of effort nor allow an ounce of technical debt into the things I maintain on behalf of the needs of Omarchy. If DHH opens a PR for me to review, the only input I’m going to provide is a rejection. It is my prerogative what I’ll spend my efforts on and DHH is not going to be one of those things.
This is a common refrain that I find pretty frustrating. It’s often said that we should keep politics out of open source because all that matters is whether someone’s work is useful. Or another way of saying it is: Code is code. But that’s not how it works. I would argue that first and foremost, code is people. We only have code because people had a reason to have it. There is no code without the people who motivated it. So this idea that code is valuable for its own sake is nonsense to me. Code is valuable because of the people who care about it.
And people are social. People talk to each other, exchange opinions and perspectives, and they learn whether or not they like each other. Like it or not, a massive part of open source contribution is the social aspect of working with other people to reach consensus on what the best code is. Imagine you’ve had to work with someone reviewing their past 10 PRs, and with each one you found the person a little more grating and a little more problematic. The way they speak, or the tactics they use, or whatever other non-technical quality naturally comes up during collaboration. Eventually your interactions with that person are going to become a lot more hostile, even if only passive aggressively, than they were in the first interaction.
This is people. People are messy. The real work in open source, realistically, is figuring out how to work with them. And sometimes people come along who you are just very certain you cannot work with. Their code doesn’t matter. The person does.
It’s so often about politics because there’s a lot that’s “political” that shouldn’t be. LGBTQ rights are political only because there are enough hateful people to influence the outcomes of elections. Politics should be about resolving reasonable disagreements (even if only by rejecting the notion of the losing vote) about public policy. It is not a reasonable disagreement for people to just reject LGBTQ rights, so that shouldn’t be political; those people should just not see their ideas become policy. But those people vote, and they speak on the news, and they spread toxic ideas. So they make these things political by convincing others of lies and contributing to who’s in power and what they’ll do with that power.
When there are people who reject others’ human rights in a space that is inherently social such as an open source community, it’s no wonder that those people interact negatively with the people around them. People are messy. Maybe they’ll get by posting a couple PRs without any difficult interactions happening, but the longer they stick around, the more certain it is that hostility is going to form between them and the people they don’t like. That is not something to invite into the community just because their code is “useful”. Far more important than any code is the people who care for it. When an obviously hateful person approaches a community, the top priority of that community should be to prevent that person from inflicting that hate upon itself, because the people in that community are the things that matter, not whatever treasure that person brought along with them. Code is not just code. Code is people.
