In my view, all software is political in one way or another. Also, when software makes an attempt to be “politically neutral”, in doing so it is making a political point.
So let’s pick the Linus questionable part regarding the not a Social Warrior place, and I feel that it is time to either think about it or talk about it.
All feedback is welcomed.
Consider the following as one example:
Most programming languages are english-centric and even the ones that support unicode for defining variables and method statements might not support right to left languages. Then there are different numeric systems that are culturally based. These technical decisions have a social impact that makes it more difficult for other cultures to interact with the codebase by increasing the barrier of entry. Does this mean i stop writing code in python or Javascript for work? No, because that would be too difficult and high of a cost. But i don’t deny the social and political impact of these decisions.