That is very much a political decision.

No it’s a neutral position not taking a stance for or against a particular business because of politics. So while it may look to someone like it’s “for” something, they’d also take business from an “ICE-alert” system, so from some PoV that would look like it’s “against”, but it’s not. It’s staying neutral.

If you are helping someone by providing products or services to them, you are by definition actively helping them do whatever they do. That's not neutral. Being neutral is neither helping nor hindering them.

> they’d also take business from an “ICE-alert” system

We have no evidence of this.

On the other hand, we have the statements that I literally quoted in my comment, where GitHub's COO says "it's important that ICE get its job done because they do X, Y, and Z, which are good," you have sales staff using American flag emoji, etc. Would you expect GitHub's CFO to also "it's important that this ICE-alert group get their job done because ICE does X, Y, and Z which are bad actually"?

Doing nothing and accepting money from an organization like ICE is 100% a political choice.

There's the edge of a definitions rabbit-hole looming.

To short-circuit it, let's establish as ground-truth that some people think "neutral" is the same has having no position, and some people think "neutral" is a position one can try to take that will have consequences, same as any other position, and at the end of the day, the effects are the same whether it's not a position or a position so the question of "position-ness" of neutrality is moot in a discussion of outcomes.

If a company declares selling computers to the legitimate government of a country is "Just doing business," then, well, that's IBM during the reign of the Nazi party, and history has held them accountable regardless.

So ultimately we’re societies built on laws. Sometimes we have embargoes. We don’t allow sales to Iran or Cuba, but we allow sales to China and Russia and a bunch of others. Most companies stay neutral and don’t take a stance. Walmart and Amazon don’t check you or me for our good citizen creds before selling goods to us. We could be ex felons for all they care. Unless the gov says don’t sell something to X, then we can. It’s a bit of circular reasoning but that’s all we have. We build human institutions to support our human activities.

Sure, no disagreement there. But I'll note that those institutions all have the liberty (with the exception of specific legal constraints like Title VII) to refrain from providing service to any of the categories you described. In fact, quite a few companies won't hire ex-felons; there's no law requiring them to do so at the federal level. And a recent Supreme Court case indicated that nothing in the law stops a bakery from refusing to make a wedding cake for a gay couple.

These are sliding scales of "how much do I care about the metadata on my customers," and most companies find it optimal to set the scales nearly to zero to maximize revenue. That's not a universal truism.

> "If a company declares selling computers to the legitimate government of a country is "Just doing business," then, well, that's IBM during the reign of the Nazi party, and history has held them accountable regardless."

Seems more like a historical footnote than any real accountability. IBM is still around and the era where "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" and had a immense workforce occurred well after the WWII era.

The fact they're noted in the history books as aiding the Holocaust carries a weight to it different than the dollars-and-cents accounting, but if you're interested more in practical effect: they still have to push harder than peer companies to hire because they have a mixed reputation (that younger companies don't have, even if that's merely because they haven't had time to grow one yet).

Non-rhetorical-or-sarcastic question: What human rights violations would ICE have to commit to make it political for you? e.g. above or below Abu Ghraib prison level?

Saying "stay out of their way" about ICE seems pretty political to me.

And I believe the same applies to anyone else who does not support the way that ICE is being run currently.

I can't speak to the perspective of the other side of this issue, though.

Right, and IBM was also leaving out politics when they built custom tabulating machines to help Nazi Germany's logistics.

Obvious hyperbole but you get the idea.

> Yes. If IBM built something that helped the government during the Obama administration, would you consider it "political" too?

Helping the government in general != helping one specific government agency with a narrow mission. Maybe you could provide an example of a government program/agency whose mission you consider somehow "opposite" to ICE.

But sure. Helping any entity accomplish a politically controversial activity is a political act.

> IBM was also leaving out politics when they built custom tabulating machines to help Nazi Germany's logistics.

Yes. If IBM built something that helped the government during the Obama administration, would you consider it "political" too?

For my part - yes. I think it's fine for companies to be political. I am totally supportive of this, and I don't think it's possible for a large company to be apolitical in a meaningful sense. (Many of the largest internet companies are founded on the belief that uncensored sharing of information is a good thing, which is definitely a political stance.)

I think we should admit that, and then say, it's okay for GitHub employees to say "My employer's politics don't agree with mine, so I'm not going to work for them anymore," and for GitHub users to say analogous things. My point is that it's deliberately deceptive for GitHub to hide behind the claim of being apolitical.

I don't think it's meant to be deceptive. When companies say they're being apolitical, they don't normally mean they're attempting some careful calibration where nothing they do is relevant to any political cause. They just mean they don't want to participate in political battles.