Keeping KDE Apolitical

[Anonymous Viewer]

Hello everyone,

Something concerning that was brought to my attention compelled me to compose my thoughts. For the sake of maintaining a healthy community with a diverse array of people from different backgrounds, I would like to implore that you please keep KDE Plasma apolitical. It should not be used as a platform for character assassination or the badjacketing of people and organisations for political views which may differ from your own. There could be about half a dozen of reasons why KDE Plasma may have wished to abstain from interacting on X/Twitter and each of them likely to be valid from a purely technical or utilitarian prospective. Instead, an employee of KDE Plasma for promotion and communication asserted their own politics and spoke on behalf of KDE Plasma as a whole in a statement when addressing why KDE Plasma has stopped posting to X.

I don't think this is something that should be tolerated in our community, as the politicisation of projects and hobbies only serves to sow division which leads to ostracism and exclusion rather than inclusion. Hobbies should be politically neutral as to remain inclusive for all people from different walks of life. The founding ethos of the free and open source community ensured that nobody was excluded or marginalised for their immutable traits or beliefs as they did not matter or would've otherwise impacted a person's ability to participate. These very founding principles are being threatened by those who that assert their politics into the hobbies and projects where it has no business being. The free and open source movement is political in nature, yes. However, there should be absolutely no room for identity politics and culture wars which distract from the very purpose of our hobby. Creating, maintaining and iterating on software and public infrastructure that anyone may freely use for the betterment of humanity.

I've left my thoughts here in good faith as a user of KDE Plasma and welcome any discussion or feedback.

Thank you all for your time and cheers for reading.

—Slopsec

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