'Everyone Should Have a Moral Code' Says Developer Who Deleted Code Sold to ICE
vice.com
vice.com
Then I read the article: Oh. You weren't paid for it. You wrote some code, hosted it (with the intent that a third party could use it), and then a third party used your code for a product sold to ICE.
Without saying anything about free software. Companies that repackage and sell free software really should have the logistics in place such that this event wouldn't be problematic.
If you host software for free and you don't like what people are doing with it, then I think you should be able to stop hosting that software.
You absolutely can. This is the point of a contract.
GitHub was the host, he just deleted the project from his profile.
But you're right, Chef should've precluded this as a possibility a long time ago. The only reason this was possible was lack of proper Continuity-of-Business setup, but even then they had a new repo up within the day so it's not all that much impact.
Free PR for the involved, and free ad-dollars to those who choose to report on it.
This person is not an open source developer, since they restricted the usage of their code. They have the right to restrict usage of course, but please don't taint the idea of open source software.
This is human progression, trial and error, and societal evolution happening before our eyes. You won't be able to stop this, it's a natural process that drives society. All you can do is influence this progression.
Sure, closing those wouldn't actually hurt China's reeducation camps, but then the same is true for this developer's repo and ICE. (Since I doubt ICE uses bleeding edge Chef, Chef's temporary downtime would have had no effect)
If you're talking about writing bespoke software for them, that's a different matter than this particular situation.
Not to mention, if it's FOSS they can respect your IP and still use it - after all, you did give them (and everyone else) a license...
Seth Vargo, was a former employee... and maybe also kept contributing FOSS after no longer being an employee? Unclear.
It's not quite either of your situations, but more like the bespoke software I'd say.
At any rate, if I wrote FOSS that happened to be used by ICE in a significant way, I'd feel really sad and confused and not sure what to think or what to do -- I'm not sure what the solution to this situation is, but I wouldn't feel good about it.
If I worked for CEO Crist/Chef Inc. -- I'd quit. Cause that shit is disgusting.
If I was Vargo, doing some combination of writing code for an employer on the job, and maybe also just contributing open source to the project after that, maybe cause it was a cool/interesting project/community he liked... but then discovering that Chef Inc. and Barry Crist were _using the code I wrote to make money by helping ICE with their information systems_....
I'd be fucking mad as hell.
I'm not sure anything can be done about it legally in the long term, if the code was released open source. But I understand the anger and attempt to be as disruptive as possible. Cause Fuck That Shit.
> "My goal is to continue growing Chef as a company that transcends numerous U.S. presidential administrations. And to be clear: I also find policies such as separating families and detaining children wrong and contrary to the best interests of our country,"
Is basically a paraphrase of the psychopathic CEO's statement in the movie _Sorry to Bother You_. To me, the most genius gut-punchingly funny part of the movie (which is full of genius laugh out loud and cringe-inducing parts).
"See? It's all just a big misunderstanding."
"This ain't no fucking misunderstanding, man. So, you making half-human half-horse fucking things so you can make more money?"
"Yeah, basically. I just didn't want you to think I was crazy. That I was doing this for no reason. Because this isn't irrational."
"Oh. Cool. Alright. Cool. No, I understand. I just, I just got to leave now, man. So, please get the fuck out of my way."
The comments attacking the straw man are seemingly only written to satisfy an attack against an other, which here seems to be the other that "supports illegal immigration", and I don't believe these attacks further the conversation. Nowhere do we have evidence that OP or anyone defending him is in favor of fully open borders, an accusation thrown around more than once in these comments.
Regardless of the "why", the more interesting discussion is the "should", as in "should people be allowed to rescind their open source work for any reason". Otherwise, we are just wading back into a political discussion where people are not interested in listening, only fighting.
Please, tell me how saying "you can't arrest people who cross the border illegally" is different from supporting open borders. (Since ICE is legally required to separate children from 'parents' when arresting them, just like every other law enforcement agency, "don't separate families" is equivalent to "don't arrest anyone crossing the border with someone who says they're a child")
EDIT:
To be clear, my argument is that the thing you called a strawman ("Nowhere do we have evidence that OP or anyone defending him is in favor of fully open borders") is equivalent to a belief you suggested to be much more likely ("Instead, it is much more likely that he dislikes the tactics used by ICE, such as separating families"). The argument is as follows:
"ICE should not separate families" is equivalent to "ICE should not arrest families", as ICE is required by law to separate families after arrest.
"ICE should not arrest families" is equivalent to "ICE should not arrest people crossing the border", as any competent border-hopping group will either have a child with them or someone who says they're a child. (Yes, they might not be related - that's what separating families was partially intended to find out)
"ICE should not arrest people crossing the border" is equivalent to "ICE should not enforce borders" is (IMO) equivalent to "Open borders should be a thing".
I'm not sure that I'm the person refusing to engage here.
What is the desired outcome? The options I can think of are: 1) Let them go 2) Don’t arrest them at all 3) Arrest one parent, let the other parent free in the US with kids 4) arrest both parents, set the kids free alone 5) arrest both parents, let kids stay with citizens 6) arrest both parents, let kids stay with non-citizens 7) arrest all four, keep kids in jail 8) arrest parents, detain kids in non-prison weird foster care thing
All of these seem to suck for me and make me confused.
Are there other options that I’m missing? I’m against separating families and putting kids in cages and want to solve it. What are the options that we can do?
(I think those are even worse, for the record)
5/8 are what we do for other crimes, though. And that's part of the reason this is such a good scissor - a lot of people see others saying "you can't break up illegal immigrant families!" and wonder why that doesn't apply to the families of US citizens, too.
Crossing the border illegally is a misdemeanor. Unless we start separating and detaining families indefinitely for speeding and public intoxication, we should probably stop doing it for crossing illegally.
Otherwise, we should change the laws regarding illegal crossing to make the procedures and penalties more explicit. As it stands now, locking up non-violent offenders for illegal crossing is a totally arbitrary policy dictated by the whichever administration is in power. There's nothing in the laws that say families have to be detained (and thus separated.)
This isn't really the case for people crossing the border illegally. Almost by definition they won't have a permanent address or a life to be uprooted from (or if they do, they're already uprooted from it - that's why they're crossing the border), and if they're set free they most likely won't have legal ways to support themselves. (No green card == no legal employment prospects)
I'd love to see historical rates of people showing up for their court hearings in illegal immigration cases like you describe, though - maybe I'm wrong!
Even today, +80% of families released show up to their immigration court hearings after being released[1]. (edit) Here's data going back to 2001 showing +90% appearance rate[2]
The idea that we have to hold them indefinitely (and thus split children apart from parents) or else they might slip away and get lost in the system is based on an assumption that the people we're detaining don't want to do the right thing. The vast majority of them do. The reason they're crossing illegally is usually because they are fleeing a time-sensitive problem (domestic violence, gangs, etc.) that they can't wait for our immigration bureaucracy to sort out and let them in "the right way." Once they're here, they seem very willing to be in the system if it means getting a chance to stay.
[1] https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/562/ [2] https://www.humanrightsfirst.org/resource/fact-check-asylum-...
I support the idea of release on zero dollar bail for all nonviolent misdemeanors for first or maybe even second time offenders.
It seems like the penalty for this crime is max jail time six months [0] so definitely should at least be releasing people who have been detained longer than this.
Public intoxication varies by state (in Florida it’s max 90 days [1]) and it’s not a federal crime. Speeding is really not a comparable misdemeanor as to get to jail time you have to get to reckless driving or something, a crime that would definitely get you arrested if you had two kids in the backseat.
I don’t know of an appropriate misdemeanor comparison that is respectful as using petty theft or prostitution or trespassing may have similar penalties but leave a bad taste in my mouth because don’t seem appropriate comparing to a family trying to enter the US. Maybe failure to pay child support [2] would be equivalent if somehow both parents got charged with it at the same time. They would be subject to a misdemeanor and six months in jail.
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1325 [1] https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/florida-publ... [2] https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/criminal-penalties-for-fai...
Unless you're saying that after the father crosses illegally into the US, ICE invades his home country and kidnaps his family?
Also, back to the drunk/reckless driving analogy - I wonder what the police do when someone gets arrested doing that with their kids in the back?
I don’t think illegal entry is the same as reckless driving, but I think in a situation where both parents were driving a car 120mph with two kids in the back seat, the cops would try to find family to take the kids or put them in foster care.
I think in this situation, the problem is compounded because likely friends and family are less likely to come to jail for fear of being arrested due to status.
I think a worthy cause would be some sort of big foster care movement where children are kept in super nice homes while parents are arrested and detained.
Well, stepping back from US immigration policy, it seems a little inconsistent, bordering on immoral, to contribute to open source (as in, anybody can use this) and then change your mind about who can use it later.
I have bad news for almost every open source contributor then.
That said, playing the FOSS game means that by default you risk supporting people you don't like, that's kind of the whole point of the "Freedom" part of it. Free as in speech.
Tons of major FOSS tools and libraries are used around the world by dictators and henchmen and unsavory people alike. Pick your favorite massive OSS project that you might have contributed to: Putty, Linux, OpenCV, Go, ROS, Elasticsearch, tar, Neo4j, MySQL etc.... and you'll have contributed some code that is used by some murderous regime somewhere.
Do whatever you have to do to make it feel like you didn't support those with some tiny OSS contribution, but just recognize it's pretty arbitrary and own that.
What is going on here does NOT seem to be simply a case of the government using open source code.
> "While I understand that many of you and many of our community members would prefer we had no business relationship with DHS-ICE, I have made a principled decision, with the support of the Chef executive team, to work with the institutions of our government, regardless of whether or not we personally agree with their various policies," Crist wrote, who added that Chef's work with ICE started during the previous administration.
So it seems what happened here is Chef the company went beyond writing FOSS that happened to be picked up by ICE, they have some business relationship with ICE where they get paid.
I thought chef was open source, so was confused about what selling the code would entail, but googling discovered that it was "open core"... until apparently April of this year when they released all code apache? https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/02/chef-goes-100-open-source/
Which leaves me a bit more confused.
Vargo was a former employee of Chef the company... who maybe also made open source contributions to the project after he no longer worked there? Unclear.
But this quote from CEO Crist is just garbage:
> "My goal is to continue growing Chef as a company that transcends numerous U.S. presidential administrations. And to be clear: I also find policies such as separating families and detaining children wrong and contrary to the best interests of our country," he wrote.
And you determined there were no ways of "growing Chef as a company" that didn't require aiding and profiting from activities you yourself consider wrong?
Does he really think this is a sentence that makes sense and makes him look good? I think he simply told us he prioritizes money above his own values, basically that he is a moral coward unwilling to stand by his convictions.
But yeah, the article doesn't give the open-source-geeky details we developers interested in open source want. What exactly is the relationship between Chef Inc and ICE? Of Vargo to Chef Inc? Vargo stopped being a chef employee when, and.. continued to contribute to chef after that? What is this "revert to a previous version" going on, to what previous version, a version before Vargo even had any contributions, or what? Which came first, Chef Inc. or chef as a community open source project?
If you want to have availability guarantees you should arrange a paid contract. Otherwise you are literally demanding someone else do free work for you.
Developers ultimately have judgement over which projects they contribute to, and if they feel that more harm is coming out of their work than good, then they have every right to cease development.
Open source, compared to other development models, suffers the least from this problem in that there is no single developer that has jurisdiction over how the product is used. FOSS projects can always be forked, if need be.
Have you ever actually read a proprietary software license?
So they stopped allowing chef to use their software.
That Chef didn’t have an alternative is entirely on Chef.
Unless of course you are saying that you believe that individuals should be required to provide it to anyone who asks?
Because the software was open source.
> to do something that person didn’t want their software to be used for.
I didn't realize Chef had to analyze every open source contributors political opinions.
> So they stopped allowing chef to use their software.
Which is against the entire idea of open source software.
Arguably, they only have to analyze their own, if it's immoral enough.
I do have a moral code, and I believe that everyone should. However, this developer implies that everyone with a moral code should align with his actions.
A lot of politically charged comments in here.
Many think selling to ICE is wrong, but many others think it's entirely moral/justified.
And the same goes for everything else. Almost every political/moral position you can think of can probably be justified using one moral or ethical code or another. Are their actions right or wrong according to utillitarianism or deontology or virtue ethics? Well if you ask ten different people you'll get ten different answers.
So I'm not sure what to think there.
P.S. The whole 'right side of history' thing is super tiresome to read about, since the right side isn't necessarily the 'moral' one, but merely the one with the most cultural mindshare at the time.
Either way, I guess I'm just frustrated by how all these media stories seem to be about the software engineer annoyed by the likes of ICE/the military/whoever using their code rather the other way around. Or perhaps the constant focus on ethics in tech as if said ethics are somehow universal/can be agreed upon.