I disagree, to an extent as you created a dichotomy between tech and religious arguments. The truth is there is a spectrum, where a compiler error is a purely t

I disagree, to an extent as you created a dichotomy between tech and religious arguments. The truth is there is a spectrum, where a compiler error is a purely technical discussion. On the other hand of the spectrum are loosely related to tech like, "I need to see more from you before we tackle bigger changes". Open source is definitely very political and if you are not political you will find you will produce lots of technical output that will never be merged. There is also lots of etiquette that can go to using mailing list and patchset formatting to knowing who to ask to review. When you talk about design changes you better have credibility, as your design might not even be evaluated if you do not have a track record. I really disagree with your comment and in my experience with lots of OSS different projects i contributed to, i can tell you politics is equal or more important than raw technical competence the bigger the project is.