[somenameforme]

Imagine the result if everybody took to this mindset. Look at everything that's on your desk right now, and what percent of it was made in e.g. China. Imagine if they decided to just start jamming political slogans onto everything. Or for something closer to home, surgeons and anesthesiologists are largely conservative. [1] Imagine if they started signaling their politics. Many people, ironically often those most predisposed to try to make their own political views highly visible, do a poor job of tolerating the views of others. This sort of behavior would just cause complete chaos and disorder and make everybody even more pissed off at each other than they already are.

And political signaling can also make you look bad even to the audience that might ideologically agree with you. For instance notepad++ takes a position on essentially every big controversial US geopolitical issue, but they are conspicuously silent on the Gaza issue. If they hadn't taken on any political positions, this isn't an issue. But when they take a position on every divisive issue, suddenly their not taking a position on one like this effectively is taking a position, but it's one that (for once) they don't want to say.

[1] - https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/870192?form=fpf

[delecti]

A few cosmetic names for patch versions and political banners on websites seems pretty mild. I was a constant user of Notepad++ for more than a decade (until moving my last computer to Linux a few months ago), and never had any idea that they did any of the messaging listed on their Wikipedia.

If anything, I could stand for most things to be just a bit more political than them. Most things are way more political than that.

[somenameforme]

What non-political things would you say are "way" more political than what they're doing? What I mean by non-political is that you kind of expect this sort of nonsense in the media or whatever, but not a text editor. They also have their schtick in the documentation, and at times have included it as 'easter eggs' in the program itself.

It's already made the software a target for hacking amongst other things. Taking positions that resonate with perhaps half the people in 15% of the world, and piss off a sizable chunk of people in the remaining 85% of the world is not a great idea. And, from my perspective, it's not just about self defense - but why do you even want to do that?

I hold some fringe views relative to many on here at least, and I don't make any secret of it either - but imagine by username was like 'IllegalImmigrantsAreIllegal' or something. It'd be like 'oh cool, I see you're 13.' I see this as something along the same lines. If the topic comes up, it comes up, but making it a part of your identity is childish and antagonistic.