Bad politics in a software project is a lot like subjectivity, it can never be fully eliminated, but we should still strive to reduce it to the minimum.. If bad political processes become common in a project, then important features are dropped, bugs are left unfixed, patches are stalled, external projects gets stalled or are killed, people become frustrated or angry and possibly leave the project - and the project may risk forking.

So it's a good idea to keep bad politics at bay and to a minimum. How to do that is out of the scope of the document, but it's usually up to the leaders to keep it so and maintain a good policy that will make as few people as possible frustrated and will not flabbergast external contributors. And naturally, for open-source and similar projects, a fork is often an option in this case, or in other similar cases.