An open letter to GitHub from the maintainers of open source projects
github.com
github.com
ICE has done, and continues to do some terrible things. Horrible, horrible things; all legal things, but nonetheless horrible. But, frankly, if its legal, I am much less comfortable with Github's users subverting the US legal system by backdooring their moral code into products these legal entities rely on. Go to your senators. Go out and vote. Go protest. It's not that hard, but it is much harder than signing your name on a petition.
This is the protest. This is one form of how protest looks like.
Why wouldn't they get together and shame a company when that company acts against their own moral values? Is the best possible solution to wait until the first Tuesday in November and hope for the best? I am sure many will also vote, call their elected officials, go to a protest. They'll also sign online petitions.
If they add an ethical vetting layer in there, ok, sure this one is an easy call. But people will continue to complain about other government agencies, foreign and domestic. People will complain about corporations who violate privacy or violate open source licenses or violate web standards. People will complain about non-profits who align with religious or political interests. People will complain about polluters and arms manufacturers or companies with ties to polluters or arms manufacturers.
Next thing you know, GitHub can't sell to the State Department or DOJ or Ford or GM or Maersk or Boeing or Shell or Aramco or Google or Facebook or McKinsey or so many others. And, I dunno, cutting those organizations out might be a great ethical move, but I'm not sure spending significant amounts of time investigating organizations and adjudicating the results and deciding NOT to make sales and dealing with the inevitable lawsuits is going to help GitHub make money.
You don't need to do any of that, just wait and let the angry mob tell you who to not do business with.
Drafting an online petition like this is not too far off from storming someone’s place of work and asking them to forego their main means of survival. I understand the outrage over human rights abuses, but this isn’t the forum.
Yes it is the forum. No it's absolutely nothing like telling someone to "forego their means of survival".
The CEO of GitHub is not going to starve if he gets fired.
But Companies are not People. So this is a dumb metaphor.
Vote, protest [2], run for office [2]. No other actions provide for material change.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21274511 (Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work )
[2] https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_pdf_file/kyr_...
Not sure where the conditional is coming from, its right in the second paragraph with sources:
> This government agency is actively committing numerous crimes and human rights violations, in contravention of both US and international law.
https://www.clearinghouse.net/detail.php?id=15649
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/02/how-badly-did-cb...
https://www.opb.org/news/article/ice-courthouse-arrest-ban-o...
https://www.aclu.org/cases/escobar-v-gaines
https://www.aclu.org/cases/colotl-v-kelly
https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/local-news/ice-agents-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/29/us/ice-detains-woman-cali...
https://www.aclumich.org/en/press-releases/aclu-sues-ice-us-...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/francisco-galicia-ice-releases-...
https://www.aclu.org/cases/immigrants-rights/morales-v-chadb...
https://www.propublica.org/article/pennsylvania-ice-who-poli...
etc. etc. etc.
Note that many of my examples, which I found in about 10 minutes of searching, are single cases of violations that happen constantly. For example, I listed a couple US citizens that were wrongfully arrested by ICE, which happened thousands of times: https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-citizens-ice-20180...
I don't follow this logic. If it's legal, we should not take moral stances in our actions outside of political actions? Doesn't the concept of "voting with your wallet" expressly involve taking moral stances in ALL actions? Sure, the open source projects may not be paying Github directly, but I'm VERY uncomfortable with saying that money is the only way to take a moral stance.
The idea that there's some set of actions that should be categorically immune to moral reactions is...weird at best and feels pretty darn dangerous. Almost no one wants to make every decision an intense moral debate, but the OPTION should exist. Otherwise you just create places to foster corruption.
> It's not that hard, but it is much harder than signing your name on a petition.
This feels like a false choice. Doing one doesn't mean the other is unavailable, and doing one doesn't mean you SHOULDN'T do the other. Indeed, if you think the stakes are high, doing both seems to be the best option.
I'll start paying attention when they actually start deleting repositories. That's also when Github will start paying attention; they've gotten enough warning.
But no one will actually do that, because everyone who signed this but still has a community and a repository on Github is a coward. They love all the free stuff, and they'd love for Github to just do whatever they tell them to do, but without any of that icky hard work like migrating a community to someone with more aligned morals.
Prove me wrong. Delete your account, NOW. Please. Prove me wrong. No one will. Because all anyone ever does is whine; no one acts. Its so easy to sign your name and complain; its hard to actually Act.
Hopefully this argument will die soon. You don't hear anyone talking about how Google should be treated as a charity because the price of their search engine and YouTube is $0. Nor do you hear it about Facebook. Nor do you hear it about any other marketing campaigns by anyone else. That's their business model. What really bugs me when someone says this about Github is that Github added closed infrastructure on top of an open source project. Without open source projects giving them the product and then the free marketing, they sure as hell wouldn't have sold for $7.5 billion. Open source projects don't also have to be forever in the debt of Github as well, do they?
I'm not going to comment on the rest of your argument, but your opening sentence is really weak.
I guess we've politicized code now. Has anyone looked at the political system of discourse lately? Keep that shit out of code, or we're doomed as a profession.
Like ???????????
Politics is money and power. Tech is money and power. Tech is politics. And anyone who says otherwise is trying to undermine your power by obscuring this reality.
>take YOUR politics outside, and make more room for MINE.
The only ones trying to enforce political opinions on software development are those who claim the status quo is broken. Those who push for vague COCs as political tools to oust anyone with inappropriate opinions. People who put developer feelings over merit and productivity. The rest, and majority, of us are just trying to write code.
The only way to legitimately act as though "everything is political" is by playing a bastardized version of six degrees of separation, and in doing so insufferably forcing the polarization of any environment in which one participates. If you can't separate politics from work and entertainment, you have a serious problem.
Well... them, and those who claim the status quo is working.
The room does not disappear when you close your eyes, and a randomly wired neural network still has bias.[1]
I agree with you completely, if you are to the point of worrying about the contracts a company that provides an excellent free service to the world holds, how can you survive without being upset that your phone has components made in east asian sweatshops, your clothing as well, you probably eat food farmed/slaughtered in unsustainable/unethical manners, the list goes on and on.
Even if GH cancels their contract to placate this incredibly small vocal minority, they'll just move onto something else to impose their own personal moral outrage upon. It is a dead end. It is impossible to please everyone, and you shouldn't try to either.
Internet activism only works due to the overamplification of voice, because the vast majority of people really do not care, they use Github because it is a stellar product.
Intersectional politics are awful.
I think the core idea of open source is that code should be shared for free. Not shared for free (with people I politically agree with). By policing who can use software, the author's of this letter are very much going against the spirit of open source.
It should not be the position of the tool maker to dictate who can use the tool they create. Once you put it out in the world, people you don't agree with will use your software (if you're lucky enough to have users that is).
I see no difference in slamming Github for having a customer certain activists don't like vs the MPAA cracking down on DeCSS.
I'd be inclined to agree, but it's a little weird in this case because GitHub itself is proprietary software, so they've always been in the business of policing who can use it.
Contrast: if ICE were using GitLab and GitLab decided to pull the contract, ICE could just (well, "just") self-host and be on their way. Open source in practice was always more about the freedom to walk away than about collaboration, and this is reflected in the licenses. Exit rather than voice, if you will.
We're not trying to infringe on ICE/CBP's ability to use popular open-source software. We're simply asking some companies not to help them with support contracts.
Hope this helps!
> By not choosing one, you're choosing the existing system
It's become quite popular to say that being ok with the status quo is a political position. And while I couldn't disagree more, I've always believed in free software and I'll proudly stand by that status quo as my political position if that's how others want to view it.
It's common for especially B2C corporations to have highly documented CSR policies. They will not work with suppliers that perform testing on animals. Or employ child workers. And they will not work with suppliers who have suppliers that do those things. The entire chain is potentially audited. I approve of this concept and I vote with my wallet.
This situation, however, is different. Whereas companies choose suppliers, they don't really choose customers. At least by some definition, the customers choose them. I know that this gets muddy because sales, but still. And I don't like the idea that companies should start auditing their customers. What if some company that deals with ICE uses Github? Or say someone who used to work at ICE formed a company -- is that company in the clear? Doesn't seem like a viable direction to me.
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Someone should develop a distributed version control system...
Open source is no longer free, so we do not have a choice.
No. No no no no. Stop using Git like SVN. Fork the projects if you don't agree with the maintainers choosing to stay with Github. Don't ask nicely, write manifests, sign petitions, etc.. fucking act!
This issue makes a very good point!