Among computer geeks, myself included, there's a long running optimistic belief that projects can be considered in isolation and 'evaluated on their own merits', divorced from the specific people or organizations that are involved with them and the culture that they have created . At best, this view imagines that we can treat everyone involved in the development of something as a reliable Vulcan, driven entirely by cold logic with no human sentiment involved. This is demonstrably false (ask anyone about the sharp edge of Linus Torvalds' emails), but convenient, at least for people with privilege .

(A related thing is considering projects in isolation from the organizations that create and run them, for example ignoring that something is from 'killed by' Google .)

Over time, I have come to understand and know that this is false, much like other things I used to accept . The people involved with a project bring with them attitudes and social views, and they create a culture through their actions, their expressed views, and even their presence. Their mere presence matters because it affects other people, and how other people will or won't interact with the project.

(To put it one way, the odds that I will want to be involved in a project run by someone who openly expresses their view that bicyclists are the scum of the earth and should be violently run off the road are rather low, regardless of how they behave within the confines of the project. I'm not a Vulcan myself and so I am not going to be able to divorce my interactions with this person from my knowledge that they would like to see me and my bike club friends injured or dead.)

You can't divorce a project from its culture or its people (partly because the people create and sustain that culture); the culture and the specific people are entwined into how 'the project' (which is to say, the crowd of people involved in it) behaves, and who it attracts and repels. And once established, the culture of a project, like the culture of anything, is very hard to change, partly because it acts as a filter for who becomes involved in the project. The people who create a project gather like-minded people who see nothing wrong with the culture and often act to perpetuate it, unless the project becomes so big and so important that other people force their way in (usually because a corporation is paying them to put up with the initial culture).

(There is culture everywhere. C++ has a culture (or several), for example, as does Rust. Are they good cultures? People have various opinions that I will let you read about yourself.)