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Comment by 013a | Hacker News Reader

These open source projects certainly love the very high quality, free services Github offers them, until they start learning how the sausage is made.

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.

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> 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

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.

They're threatening a boycott. They're not actually boycotting.

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.

Increasingly people (esp. Millennials) consider ethics and values toward the top when deciding whether to purchase or use a product.

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.

How about funding GitHub so it has the ability to be picky and choosey about its contracts? It’s really easy to voice concern. But github can’t fund itself on concern.

Github is owned by Microsoft, and was purchased for ~8 billion dollars.

I would strongly suggest people take their political concerns to the appropriate channels - write your representatives, be active in local town council meetings, stay informed on things that civic duty requires in the US (which is expensive, btw!), and vote. It might seem pointless, but all of those things do actually matter and have measurable impacts. Your representatives do actually listen to you if you vote for or against them - and they’re not gerrymandered into a lifetime appointment or some other political failure.

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.

Are you saying that if you see somebody doing something wrong, asking them to stop is an "inappropriate channel"?

These aren’t the people doing something wrong. GitHub staff are probably treated like second class Microsoft employees all the way up to the top management at github. Any one of them voicing concern or outrage over Microsoft’s or GitHubs customer contract(s) could very well lead to their termination - even at the C-level of github or whatever is the top of their management chain.

The letter is addressed to GitHub leadership. If Microsoft does not allow them to terminate a contract for widespread ethical and legal violations, they should quit.

The CEO of GitHub is not going to starve if he gets fired.

If the CEO of GitHub gets fired it should be because he mismanaged communicating that GitHub shouldn't be the moral arbiter its customers. I think GitHub leadership's morals align with Microsoft's here. I also share this moral framework, I don't want private companies creating an extra-judicial layer of subjective morals. You shouldn't pick and choose who your customers are for many reasons.

Ok, fine, but I disagree and I'd like to tell the CEO that I don't share his moral framework. Why is sending him a letter an inappropriate channel?

Go for it! I didn't say it was an inappropriate channel (that was a GP post). I do think it's misguided and against the spirit of open source software though.

Does it make it anymore acceptable when a cashier is robbed or shot and killed on duty that the store is located in a high crime area? Jobs will be filled by someone. That never excuses abuses towards them.

I'm having a hard time understanding your reply. I don't think anyone is talking about Github being abusive to employees.

If you see someone doing something which you believe to be wrong, but the law suggests is right, asking them to stop absolutely is an inappropriate channel.

But Companies are not People. So this is a dumb metaphor.

Writing your rep is not exclusive from contacting the organization.

Yes it is the forum. No it's absolutely nothing like telling someone to "forego their means of survival".

Microsoft purchased Github as a business decision for the purpose of turning a profit, not for the purpose of running a charity for political means.

So? My point is that this isn't some scrappy startup that's desperate for funds.

It would be interesting to see a dollar value next to each signature to indicate how much money GitHub stands to lose if the signatory were to take their business elsewhere.

To where? GitLab? [1] Microsoft is almost a trillion dollar company, GitLab is valued over a billion dollars, none of those signatories have enough revenue pull to matter.

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_...

[3] https://runforsomething.net/

That was the point of the comment you're responding to, I'm almost certain. They just said the same thing as you with less detail and more sarcasm.

Considering its size and popularity, why exactly can GitHub not be picky and choosey?

How would that even work? I imagine GitHub has a pretty typical sales department right now, with salesfolks who try to make deals selling licenses to anyone willing to buy (with perhaps a handful of well-understood exceptions, like no sales to Iran or North Korea).

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.

>but I'm not sure spending significant amounts of time investigating organizations and adjudicating the results and deciding

You don't need to do any of that, just wait and let the angry mob tell you who to not do business with.

If I know that the angry mob can cut off my usage of $company at any time, and that I'm in an industry that could plausibly be the target of an angry mob... I'm probably going to avoid using $company in the first place if there are any alternatives.

Is there are reason why an angry mob could be ... angry at some company for ties with you? /s

Your assumption is that they are accepting the ICE contract despite their moral values. Maybe they do not see a conflict.

Surely you can't be equating boycotting a company with "subverting the US legal system". What am I missing here?

> These open source projects certainly love the very high quality, free services Github offers them

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.

> Go to your senators. Go out and vote. Go protest.

This is the protest. This is one form of how protest looks like.

Signing a petition is legal too?

> Horrible, horrible things; all legal things, but nonetheless horrible. But, frankly, if its legal...

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.

No one is subverting the legal system lol what the fuck "go protest" what do you think you're reading?

As you know, people are capable of voting and protesting in addition to signing a petition. Also, the stance of "you shouldn't tell an organization you don't like what they're doing unless it's literally illegal" is pretty wild. Nevertheless, since it seems to matter to you, ICE constantly breaks the 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.

Most of your links are cases of "alleged" wrongdoing by immigration officials. Stating that ICE "constantly breaks the law" is hyperbole at best.

I found many decided cases, but you're right, it takes an incredibly long time for these cases to be resolved, so many of them are still technically in question.

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...

It's possible to do both. How exactly is asking a private entity to change their behavior "subverting the US legal system?"

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