[OT] Politics and Programming

[Richmond Mathewson]

Nothing like a good old reductio ad absurdam.  :)

No, obviously not background colours (mind you, if I made
the backgrounds for my content delivery programs for
pre-teens all pink somebody would probably start asking
some funny questions pretty soon), but:

Just had a painful conversation with a Bank of Scotland
representative to set up online banking; the fact that
the service representative, every time I said I work
with Mac and Linux told me "never mind, just use
Internet Explorer" cost me an extra 15 minutes of
international rates. Those 'silly' people have just lost
another customer who will be transferring his (very
small) savings to HSBC, who are 'cool' with all platforms,
including RISC OS 5.

3-4 years ago I produced a modest program for pre-High School
kids to bone up on their Bulgarian literature (this is what is
called 'a niche market'). Discs that contained standalones for
Debian-derivatives as well as Windows ones were returned
with complaints (the feeling was that because they had
Linux standalones on them, as well as Windows one this,
somehow meant they wouldn't work on Windows).

Both of the above are things that happened as a result of
software decisions; one by the HBOS and one by myself.

Now these may not be 'Political' in the sense of politics,
but they are political insofar as they affect other people,
marketing and so on.

Kay C Lan wrote:
> On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 5:21 PM, Richmond Mathewson <
> richmondmathewson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>   
>> Every decision we, as programmers, make has some sort of
>> political impact, and as such, needs to be thought about very
>> carefully.
>>
>>     
>
> Every decision? Like the choice of my background colour is going to have any
> political connotation, who cares if it's red or blue. Ah then again, bad
> example, what about green. No, seems like I'm jumping on the eco bandwagon.
> Pink? No sexual orientation might be misconstrued. OK I'll just go with
> boring old white. Ooops just lost the black and the youth vote. OK so
> its....., I don't know ;-)
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