Also, this is a golden opportunity for multi-billion dollar tech companies to also do the same and match or double the grant money in support of PSF! Google, AWS, Microsoft, anyone?
Doing so publicly would undermine the public efforts of the same big tech firms to curry favor from the Trump Administration to secure public contracts, regulatory favors, etc. (including the very public scrapping of their own DEI programs), so I wouldn’t expect it or any other positive public involvement from them that would be connected to this. They’ve already chosen a side in this fight.
Yes they have, this is a time of choosing. So seeing which side tech companies have chosen, tech employees can now also choose accordingly.
To everyone here who spent the last decade making $400k+options at these tech firms that are now funding this fascist administration, we see you. You are making a choice as to which side you are on.
Remember doing and saying nothing is a choice.
There's a reason that Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all gave Trump money to demolish the East Wing of the White House and build a ballroom. And it's not their love of ballroom dancing.
But PSF doing this and not playing the game is really awesome. I just hope they can fund themselves through other means.
EU should be stepping up more with funding for projects like this as a replacement for US tech. Major secure reliable funding for open source projects that EU infrastructure can be built on would only increase our independence.
Not to Godwin the thread, but that is exactly what the executives at IBM thought about their European subsidiary Dehomag in the 1930s. Soon they were custom building machines that organized the logistics of the Holocaust.
They got away with it and kept all the profits and were exempted at Nuremberg, for the same reason as all the rocket scientists: America needed the tech.
I do! Have you read Timothy Snyder yet? He warns that most of the dictator's power is granted willingly. That's what this is, so to the extent you believe they are blameless, their acquiescence is in real terms making it so much worse:
"Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do." -- Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
Meanwhile, just to be clear about the game being played, food stamps are set to expire for 40 million people this week, and healthcare premiums are set to double in just a few months. I don't believe tech corporations have any plans to help Americans with their food and healthcare needs, despite being keen to chip in for the ballroom gilding.
When you have a full time secret police that wanders the streets kidnapping people, yeah that has a chilling effect, people want to keep their heads down.
And its tricky, because they will ignore the huge protests, and they want some sort of armed or civil disobedience when it comes to their secret police because they are looking for excuses to label them Antifa terrorists and escalate.
I don't see the obvious play here for Americans looking to fight this. Maybe the Midterms could help, maybe if enough local action, maybe the US to too big to cow like that, maybe the blue states have enough independence to survive the federal overreach, maybe Trump dies and MAGA dies with him.
I thought Germany still frowned on policies like Trump’s, though I suppose demolishing the White House was on its todo list at some point in the past.
It's a shame that months of NSF grant-writing work was completely wasted though.
Pretty much every "negotiation" with the Trump administration seems to work that way: An iterated prisoner's-dilemma, where any cooperation from you just means they'll betray you even harder next time...
I can also predict the next step here: UT Austin is likely to agree to the compact and will be given a huge monetary award (although I don't think it's a foregone conclusion- they didn't reply within the deadline which suggests that they are working behind the scenes on an agreement).
This forces them to cloak their real demands in something deniable, and that means you can play naive and act like the subtext was never seen.