Comments here are a dearth of actual examples. You can argue APIs are a Broadway musical if you don't give any clue what kind of APIs you're talking about. Fo

Comments here are a dearth of actual examples. You can argue APIs are a Broadway musical if you don't give any clue what kind of APIs you're talking about. For a few years I was involved in trying to get session-layer security into a networking library. The disputes were "nominally" technical, in that they were couched in technical language, but there was a strong political dimension. Here were the talking points: * Knowing that security code is likely to have bugs, isn't it better to do nothing and know it's insecure, instead of doing something, believing it to be secure, and being wrong? * What cryptographic methods are acceptable? Do we defer to some standards body, like NIST? Or do we reject NIST methods, because they are NSA shills? * Do we retrofit something off-the-shelf like TLS? (Which implementation?) Or, as a project that defines new protocols, is it within our mandate to innovate on this? Because there was no consensus on these questions, after several years it's still plaintext-only. There are, however, various "dark forks" that take minority positions, because writing code is easier than convincing people to your side. Lack of political consensus (on many issues besides this one) is killing the project, to whatever extent it isn't dead already. And even in its death throes there is this desire to pretend there are no political questions.