To fight ‘evil’ ICE, an engineer pulled his code off GitHub
theverge.com
theverge.com
This strikes me as a tone-deaf and transparently greedy response. I'm a little shocked that rather than taking a skeptical stance on the actual evil of ICE's actions, this CEO seems to accept it and argue that morality has no place in business.
Yes it is appropriate to make decisions about with whom you do business.
Yes it is practical to examine the direct outcomes of your company's contributions.
If it's not within your mission to make ethical business decisions maybe you're one of the bad guys.
What is the "evil" of ICE's actions? FUD about "cages" that where fine when it was Obama doing it?
I'm unfamiliar with how Chef works, but I wouldn't be surprised if a `bundle install` was part of the workflow. Maybe someone else with more experience here can fill in some gaps.
What he has really highlighted here is a major OpSec fail on the part of the company. They should have internal repos containing trusted and verified copies of all code they are dependent on for their build and deployment process.
His code is released under an Apache license, so it is totally legit for the company to fork the repo and produce their own private version. But they really stepped in it when they changed the license after forking, removed his name, etc....
Even less so in fact, as they'd just have someone grab it through whatever alternative distribution method you'd utilize for everyone else and bring it in.
You'd have to explicitly revoke license for everyone to do with your library as they please. I.e. become non-open source to effectively restrict access in any meaningful way.
The hope is that by disbanding ICE and handing its responsibilities over to new management with a better track record, we might get a better outcome.
I don’t think the proponents of this plan would support simply rebadging current ICE employees without some kind of filtering process.
(I don’t have a strong opinion on the matter, just restating the arguments as I understand them.)
- The current administration is super-racist
- The last administration wasn't much better because it used immigration enforcement to appease the right in hopes of obtaining political concessions
- After 9-11 DHS was set up, which was a Bad Idea, and what used to be the Immigration and Naturalization Service was split up into separate administrative (USCIS) and enforcement (ICE) wings; this was bad and correlated with a rise in anti-Muslim sentiment
- Most of the current immigration law dates back to 1996, when an imperfectly working system was swapped out for one that was far more draconian and arguably designed not to work but instead to maximize the number of people deemed 'illegal', which it definitely did
- since the late 60s/early 1970s the primary drivers behind stricter immigration policy have been white supremacists, most notably a guy called John Tanton who set up tons of front groups like FAIR, CIS, US English and so on to promote his extremist views
- but when you get down it US immigration policy has been characterized by waves of racist reaction towards Mexicans, Chinese, Irish, Germans, Italians, etc.
- not to mention the whole slavery/civil war thing, which I mention because today's Abolitionists explicitly model themselves on John Brown and also have fundamental philosophical disagreements with the role and scope of police in society, and finally
- indigenous and non-White (=/= non-caucasian) people are really sick of colonial bullshit.
To sum up, while you might or might not agree with these political stance, and the movement doesn't do the best job of communicating it, Abolitionists are fundamentally opposed to the existing order of society, are solidly grounded in the liberatory traditions of the Enlightenment, and mean business.