[GlennS]

Difficult. I will attempt to answer this in a way that won't upset people and may be informative?

Here are two ways of looking at it:

a. People in the USA* have massive fights about things that no-else cares about, and software projects put up a statement about those. This is off-putting to everyone else.

b. The USA is ahead of the curve on some political movements, and the article is expressing conservatism/anti-conservatism/a reaction towards being expected to act according to morals that aren't majority accepted in their country yet.

To decide for each particular movement whether it's (a) the wave of the future or (b) a passing fad? Who can say? You are supposedly an autonomous moral being, so use your own judgement.

*This is true of any place and any people, but everyone else has to put up with the USA's quirks because rich influential explosives. You could substitute Twitter for the USA here. Hey, who gave Twitter all those stealth bombers?

[lo_zamoyski]

I think the short answer is that the US is the dominant soft global empire (which is to say this is not merely military, but also economic and cultural). What happens in Rome ripples outward into the broader realm.

But I also believe that another contributing factor is that Americans, regardless of political affiliation, often demonstrate a presumption that their own provincial squabbles, concerns, and anxieties are shared by everyone else on the planet. This is not categorically unique to Americans, but such presumption is reinforced by boorish imperial egocentrism.

And, of course, some people simply don't have the sense, consideration, and social grace to know what the appropriate time, place, and means are for expressing political convictions, and as a result, obsessively pollute all manner of social interaction with the aforementioned topics.