alt Hacker NewsI lament the times when open source projects were open source software projects instead of political platforms for people who arrogantly think that their private political opinion is important enough to overshadow the project they participate in.
This will undoubtedly create tensions and will lead to fewer donations, thus having a negative impact on KDE.
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It's Pride Month and the organization is doing Pride things, its not that complicated.
> This will undoubtedly create tensions and will lead to fewer donations, thus having a negative impact on KDE.
"undoubtedly" is absurd here. Does KDE really have a stable of consistent transphobes donating? Do they outweigh additional donations from supporting the LGBTQ community?
Regardless, if the only point of KDE were to make money it wouldn't be a non-profit. Extremely passionate people are often passionate about a lot of things beyond just what you want from them. KDE is a community project and that community loves and accepts non-binary people.
> open source software projects instead of political platforms
OSS and FOSS movements themselves were political platforms, so this has never been true. Your problem is that you just have some issue with this one
With all due respect: it is just a picture of a cute lizard.
Thinking practically, having a male and female lizard is sort of inconvenient for a mascot, since leaving one out is a message in itself. Having a genderless mascot with art assets ready to go makes practical sense to me.
For many people open source is political.
I used to think this way but with the rise of fascism pretty much everywhere I think it's important to know what I am consuming and what they support now.
Is it perfect? No. Does it piss some people off? Probably, and I don't care.
Also it's a cute fucking lizard.
This is just concern trolling, so let's not pretend otherwise.
If a non-binary mascot "creates tensions" then by all accounts you should go outside and touch some grass.
Honestly, when was open source not political? Look at early GNU writing. The topics have change but it being political absolutely have not.
Since when was someone's gender or sexuality a "political opinion"?
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The Free Software community has always been political. Where have you been?
Introducing a non-binary mascot for KDE is no more or less political than for example Richard Stallman demanding that printer drivers should be free, back in the 1980s. And same way the use and preference of the term "open source" over "free software" -- or vice versa -- is also very political because it depends on if one wants to go with the described values or not necessarily want to stand behind them.
The Free software community involves people, and with people come shared values and politics. That's kinda what "community" implies. And if we really want to go into it, given the circumstances of the invention of things like computers, the Internet, etc. it'd be very erroneous to asset that software in general has ever been value-free or non-political. Computing artillery trajectories is political just the same way as promotion of LGBTQ+ people, even if people get more upset about the latter rather than the more kinetic kinds of politics implied by howitzers et al.