Software is Political

I recently attended the inaugural Free and Open Source Software Yearly (FOSSY) conference where I gave a talk in the XMPP track. Though my talk was just a brief technical overview of the XMPP protocol, I also gave some quick ending remarks about why I think it’s the correct choice to use as a universal standardized chat protocol. The closing remarks were written about the XMPP protocol in particular, but they are also a reflection on free and open source software more generally. This post is an adapted form of that closing statement.