> There seems to a precedent here and people are able to get around it by who they know or their reputation in the community.

Well, reputation matters.

Greg Kroah-Hartman let the Habana Labs stuff in over objections, but Habana actually open sourced its libraries later. Qualcomm has demonstrated repeatedly that they will never do that.

And, personally, I'm kinda glad GKH cut Habana some slack. A nice open-source library now exists for that and GKH cutting Habana slack may have contributed to the process.

GKH has also pointed out that he has changed his mind and wouldn't do that again.

People will often do something once because they see it as an exception. Now that this kind of thing is no longer an "exception", people are looking at it differently.

On good definition of politics is "the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations between individuals, such as the distribution of resources."

All collaborative projects are inherently political.

But that's obviously not what people mean when they criticize something as being "political". The negative connotations of the word include people having double standards based on identities or group affiliations, being disingenuous about one's actual values and motivations, abusing relationships and partnerships to further an often hidden agenda, etc.

Can you give examples of these hidden agendas?

Most of the time I see people complaining, it's more from 'I don't understand why I have to abide by the community's values (plural) in order to submit code or otherwise get free labor out of them.'

Well take, for instance, Microsoft's reputation of embrace, extend, extinguish. That's a perfect example. I don't think they're that bad any longer, but I used to work with a lot of Apache projects where people would vote against committers from another company that they happened to compete with, and have pretty flimsy explanations for why they didn't think they belonged in the community. Or people would refuse to engage on design discussions and then shoot down proposals - usually just on opposite sides of some corporate competition. That's beyond free labor - it's mixing corporate interests with community project governance, and it's contrary to what should be the inclusive and good-willed nature of non-profit open-source projects like that.

It works and everyone is better off in the end. So why give up now? You can always give up later.