Bonum Certa Men Certa

The History of Daily Links and Politics

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 20, 2025

The Lifelong Activist: How to Change the World Without Losing Your Way

I can no longer remember if Daily Links started in 2007 or in 2008, but with a little bit of time that question can be answered very accurately. See, in the early years of this site we wanted to add some GNU/Linux-centric news clippings which we lacked time to properly comment on. At some point later on some non-tech news got added, albeit filed under a suitably-named section, usually under "Leftovers".

Politics is the sort of thing that can easily divide people. That means that if everyone or almost everyone can agree about some tech issue, making this issue political would split up the resistance (or - contrariwise - the advocacy).

Imagine people saying something like, "I support Wayland, but I also support abortion..."

That's the kind of nonsense Microsoft Lunduke strives/aims for.

We try to keep politics separate from the technical issues; just because we kindly reject or turn down politicisation in the context of "tech" doesn't mean we tolerate "centrists" or "left" or "right" (those terms are more common in American political discourse; we use different terms here). We just stick to the core issues.

The FSF is also trying not to get caught up in this trap of politicisation. With the exception of the personal site of RMS [1, 2], that mostly seems to work. He refuses not to at least link to some political news of interest to him and his homepage says: "People often ask how I manage to continue devoting myself to progressive activism (such as the free software movement) for years without burning out. The best way I can answer is by recommending a book, The Lifelong Activist by Hillary Rettig. I disagree with the book on one theoretical point in the last part of the book: we shouldn't think of political activism as being marketing and sales, because those terms refer to business, and politics is something much more important than mere business."

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