Gitlab Makes a U-Turn | Hacker News Reader

Gitlab Makes a U-Turn

theregister.co.uk

39 pointsameshkov24 comments

The most upvoted thing I've ever written on here by an order of magnitude was a post on yesterday's story saying I applauded the move to ban politics and censorship at gitlab. But sure enough it looks like they've given in to louder angrier voices instead of holding their ground.

And that's the most insane part of how this works. They are doing this to appease people but on average people hate these kind of politically correct fear/shame tactics. But I guess it's difficult to measure that and those few people sure sound angry so they buckle not realizing that they are ultimately making a much more unpopular move.

If we've learned anything from Blizzard it is that it is impossible to be an international company and not participate in politics. What would GitLab do if the Chinese government ordered them to take down a repository because it's being used by Hong Kong protestors? If they take it down they are saying that China should get to control Hong Kong. If they leave it up they are saying that Hong Kong should be free of Chinese rule. Either way it is a political statement. Employees are going to have to talk about this and make decisions that reflect their values.

No, if the government orders you to do something you do it. Disobeying a legal order would be a political statement. ('civil' disobedience)

The GitLab policy was meant to stop ideologically motivated employees from sacrificing the reputation and interests of the company for their own personal political objectives. Of course, enough other compainies have already been taken over by allied ideologues that they pressured GitLab into allowing politically motivated behavior.

Obeying a government order is also a political statement that you support that government. GitLab is an international company, they don't owe an allegiance to one specific country. One country might tell them to do something and another one might tell them to do the opposite. They're going to have to pick and choose sides sometimes.

For all of the praise of diversity, all I see is a monoculture in Silicon Valley.

If you want actual diversity, go an hour or two inland. Sacramento and Stockton are a fair bit more diverse politically/socially while having a very similar degree of diversity ethnically. I can also attest (having grown up in Sacramento, and currently living in the SF area) that there's a higher degree of ethnic integration within neighborhoods and even within households/families.

The downside of making so many internal documents public like GitLab does is that policy tweaks like this can spur more external gossip. At most companies I don't think this sort of policy change would have gotten any news coverage.

OTOH, very fast and hard reality checks.

The vaguest rule to me is the one against making derogatory statements toward "our community". What community is that? Gitlab employees? Developers that upload open source software on Github? Customers that have on-prem gitlab deployments?

If a politician (or to invoke Godwin's law a literal Nazi) I don't like uses Gitlab and I say "fuck that guy", do I need to worry about my account being suspended?

That's the rule where the reality "you can't reliably encode a social decision making framework in a markdown list and need to rely on human judgement anyways" is hidden.

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