But github has a monetization strategy, they're a paid service. This is more about their headcount expanding and possibly losing paying customers because they decided to get political.
Then again, Snapchat.
That is, politics is not something you can opt out of. Choosing to do or not do certain things impacts certain individuals and groups. The result is politics. It comes to you. If you operate any system by which humans can communicate, politics is inevitable.
The ban hammer is not wielded impartially.
(it's not about politics, it's about money)
I think you argued the wrong way. The maintainer states it's skill not political views that give merit. If github hired Coraline for her political views, then github stated it's political views not skills that give merit.
> Either they have an obligation to be politically correct as a VC-funded startup that needs to ensure its public face is immaculate
Immaculate? There's no black and white here.
> or Coraline is a fantastic Ruby developer who is good at building community management tools and her politics are irrelevant.
Yes but Coraline will never be satisfied with just being a fantastic ruby developer. It was pretty clear from her comments she cares more (or at least as much) about people than software.
Who is saying this, exactly? The conclusion of that thread was the top maintainer on Opal siding with the originator. If you're worried about him removing you from his projects for your political opinions, don't work with him. This is the argument of the other side in that debate. That this thread happened on GitHub is largely irrelevant. If you're talking about hiring Coraline then you're exhibiting the same kind of intolerance for varying political opinions that people are chiding the "SJWs" for in that thread.
Bluntly: I simply don't understand why you think a controversial issue thread reflects at all on how GitHub will function as a product. It's like switching toaster brands because the toaster company hired a proponent of the Atkins diet.
Why are you assuming that GitHub will discriminate against you for your politics? I fully support your choice and in fact I think it's justified, but if you really didn't care about politics, you would keep using GitHub until they kick you off of it for thoughtcrime, as @meh would have the "SJWs" doing in that thread. It honestly just seems that you want a platform whose politics you agree with, and don't want to use a platform whose politics you disagree with.
That is totally fine and valid and is a thing everyone has the right to do. Nonetheless, it's still a politics. Politics is unavoidable, it is a consequence of being able to think and disagree. You can dislike the internal politics, but to do so you have to hold contradictory views yourself. That is the essence of disagreement, and cloaking it in anti-politics does nothing to change that.
I do care about politics, but it is irrelevant to my projects. The time to care about losing access to your source code is before you lose access to it (like backups). Github has shown that there is a signifact risk to hosting my code there so I'm moving off it.
> It honestly just seems that you want a platform whose politics you agree with, and don't want to use a platform whose politics you disagree with.
No, it want a platform that doesn't get involved with politics. Just like I don't care about the politics of any other service I use, as long as it doesn't interfere with my using it.
> Nonetheless, it's still a politics. Politics is unavoidable, it is a consequence of being able to think and disagree.
So you'd be happy to shop somewhere that doesn't allow gay people?
So I'll ask again. How, concretely, do Coraline's politics interfere with your current usage of GitHub?
And how do you know Coraline wasn't interacting in the same vein?
The parent's point is not that they want a source code platform to agree with them in all political issues. They simply don't want a platform that kicks people off for political reasons. I agree with this. Perhaps an analogy will help you understand:
I don't know or care what the political leanings of my local water and utilities companies are. But I will never willingly be a customer of a water company that occasionally shuts off the tap based on a few tweets they disagree with.
And just to be clear, "prove they're not leaving" is not a great argument. I mean I guess they might be? But $66m dollars is a lot of money. They'd have to lose over a million paying customers to lose that much from people switching away. This is a simple calculation that returns a boolean, there are either a significant number of paying customers leaving such that it impacts on the scale of millions of dollars (and we're talking about a product that is $7/month for individuals here, that's a lot of $7 subs) or there aren't.
What do you think the ballpark is for paying customers irritated enough by that thread's existence that they leave the service altogether? I honestly don't know, I wouldn't know where to begin quantifying.
Something may be causing something.
There's no proof of that.
Ah, but is there any evidence that 'Something' is *not* causing it.
There's even a name for it. It's called: argumentum ad ignorantiam (guess what that translates as), also known as an appeal to ignorance.
so there might be something to it honestly.
Apparently the cliche is right: a large portion of programmers are sorta insular and socially awkward white guys who embrace the concept of "nerd" as a positive and so are a bit defensive and feel threatened about other views and groups and people invading their social space. They may have legitimate concerns here or in similar cases, but the level of energy about it is so clearly defensive and of a magnitude that's wholly unwarrented.
There's just more going on with the sort of people who would get that up in arms over this stuff than just the surface issues themselves.
Noticed, didn't give a shit.
Frankly it was a complete over reaction based on virtue signalling, band wagoning and the general mesd that is any kind of nuanced debate online.
When I run into that stuff now I just close the tab, life is literally too short for it.
A few people making a lot of noise.
Any suggestion this had a material impact on githubs business is pure speculation.
https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941
TLDR: Some possibly transphobic person said something on the internet that got traced back to his github account. Some person not connected to the project complains and get's transphobic person removed from github. Github hires complainer to "improve diversity".
That and a couple of other things like their code of conduct have indicated that github wants to be the PC police more than a service provider. I want a dumb service provider.
I don't know if google has cleared out their "fake news" but the top hits on the subject are from heavily biased sources (geekfeminism.com and breitbart).
What I do find unsettling is the fallout, including GitHub's behaviour. I like GitHub as a product, and I use it all the time, but it seems at least moderately prudent to migrate repositories to Gitlab (or somewhere else) and keep them up to date, if only to have a backup other than my local copies if GitHub decided to close my account(1).
Looking at the wider context in the developer community, and across society, I am concerned by the number of people who want to immediately resort to the metaphorical thermonuclear option in the event of a disagreement. I mean this in terms of unyielding aggression, complete disengagement and exclusion.
I'm not specifically talking about gender issues either: Brexit and the US election are other prime examples. There's a complete lack of empathy from all sides in many online debates. It's starting to make me think psychopathy isn't so much a disorder as a spectrum on which we all sit.
On that cheerful thought, back to work...
(1) There's no reason they should that I'm aware of, but who knows what might happen in the future? Old chestnut about all eggs in one basket, etc.
The other old chestnut is "first they came for the..."
I think you're getting a bit off in terms of perspective here. There's a huge difference between [words on a page] and [Human being I'm talking to]. I might well say something that makes someone on the internet cry, I might laugh and post pubbietears.jpg if they said my comment had made them cry.
If I saw someone crying in close proximity it's likely I'd stop and ask if they were ok (albeit i would also feel very uncomfortable and undecided on said course of action in case it's imposition).
I'm being artificially extreme but it's certainly true that empathy in most people will be more pronounced for a physical person than an online username (who, lets face it, may or may not be representing their reality).
(And, sorry, my wry sense of humour doesn't necessarily work in plain text and I should make more effort to remember that. To me the spectrum idea is interesting, but it's just an idea.)
I can think of a few comments by family members (aunts/uncles etc especially) on rants by 20 somethings on facebook about how the idiot olds were screwing us all over - being quite hurt by the positions taken in the rants.
Some of this is to do with the weirdness that is facebook crossing virtual/real world interactions. But most of the people who are still obsessed with spouting their personal views on [Global warming/Brexit/Trump/Syria/etc] will quickly find a partner to trade verbal blows with
some of these people have a point - their small minority though is pretty rabid and off point. i've never seen "RESPECT ME!" ever not backfire, on any scale and for any group.
it'll be interesting how we will resolve this kind of emergent social angst - before too much of our future falls victim to it.
there was a code of conduct that people working together adhered to back in the day, and as long as it was kept minimal and professional things are just fine - but it's always over applied, and it always contributes to the fall of its parent. PC and SJWs fall into that catigory these days. they should revise their tactic, i think it does them more harm and causes them to lose credibility, rather than gain any. they might win a few battles, but we'd all lose the war.
i belong to a majority that gets shit due to what a minority does - in my head, i think the way to change that is by serving as an example for the good - and fight the bad together with everyone willing.
the Opal folk should have just apologized, said they'll talk to their dev about his actions and closed the issue, then moved on. instead, that thread's curator u/meh just fanned the flames because of his own spartan approach to community health that overshadowed project health, and ended up causing more damage than it set out to avoid.
here's hoping github survives this.
i've never seen "RESPECT ME!" ever not backfire, on any scale and for any group.
[1] clearly not meant to be an exhaustive list
When deployed during a minor skirmish, going nuclear often risks similarly nuclear retaliation.
But what I meant is the "REAPECT ME" that leads to being "tolerated" rather than it being earned respect.
Should I take from this that what is being done today is likened to what suffragettes did back in the days of first wave feminism?
As far as I can tell projects are still managing themselves as they and their leaders see fit. Seems fine to me.
The spectre of spooky SJWs haunting silicon valley shouldn't be the thing prompting people to consider redundancy in their source code management.
That was the thing that got me to delete my private repos and stop paying Github for its services - that day, they stopped being a neutral platform and became an opinionated service provider, and while I don't tend to do anything that would run afoul of their policies, I am exceptionally uncomfortable with the prospect of a platform provider exercising editorial control over others' code. I still use it for open source stuff, but I moved all my private stuff to Gitlab and have been exceptionally happy with the choice to do so.
There was the bruhaha over banning someone from the whole site for using the triggering eggplant emoji: https://mobile.twitter.com/evilaubergine/status/679108445421...
https://www.google.com.tw/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAct...
They suddenly decided to be a PC/feminist stronghold, with the associated reverse-logic, claiming words like "meritocracy" were actually oppressing and not empowering, and what not.
http://readwrite.com/2014/01/24/github-meritocracy-rug/
After that stance was lost, you would every now and then read about just another piece about Github where PC politics were being inserted as Github policy.
https://hacked.com/github-promotes-reverse-racism-sexism/
It's been a gradual, but noticeable process.
You may or may not agree with the means/politics itself, but there should be no question that Github itself has been getting increasingly political recent years.
And when you do that, you are bound to alienate someone. I, like many others, would prefer Github to remain a dumb/neutral service-provider. That's what I use it for. I don't need it to throw a political platform in my face.