I understand the point of asking the question to raise visibility, but regardless of agreement/disagreement on the issue Nat has written a response here: https://github.blog/2019-10-09-github-and-us-government-deve...

Github donated the money ICE paid them to charities that are directly counteracting the bad things ICE is doing.

Isn't that clearly better than just forcing ICE to install Gitlab?

No. It does nothing to hinder ICE's work. It does nothing to promote a culture of not helping or tolerating torturers.

Not from US and dont know the topic in depth, but I like this idea that instead of not engaging with your government, you earn their money and actively help / fund action to reverse its course. After all that is or should be how is works in a democratic country.

One step forward, and one step back, is not two steps forward.

Didn't he answer that in the comment you're replying to? He needed to get enough revenue from ICE to make GitHub free for non-enterprise users.

that's a gross misreading of the comment. ICE is by far not their biggest client and do not matter in the long run to funding free teams on Github

This should be the overriding concern of everyone in this forum. It's no longer astonishing[0], but it is quite disgusting how HN participants are able to compartmentalize their enthusiasm for technology away from moral or ethical qualms. I suppose the most generous interpretation is to assume that they are simply unaware.[1] Upstream of that ignorance, however, is a fearful unwillingness to interrogate the foundations of one's own life.

0. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." ― Upton Sinclair

1. https://crimethinc.com/books/no-wall-they-can-build

You must be enjoying quarantine, because if your ethical horse is up this high you must not be able to leave the house without encountering "qualms"

That's basically the "yet you participate in society" of ethics discourse. It's entirely possible to encounter qualms in everything you see - that's hardly a sign that the world is okay as it is and we shouldn't try to make it better.

If you think I hold you all to a higher standard than I hold myself, you're mistaken. I have never been able to leave the house without encountering qualms. The world around me is an interconnected weave. Denying that fact only makes it easer to live a very particularly worthless kind of life.

Not compartmentalising is trickier than you imply, as the whole corporate-capitalist system of power (which supplies nearly all of your and my goods) depends at its root on current exploitation and drawing down on its investment in future destruction (of the entire biosphere). We can point fingers at many hideous individual corporate citizens in tech (Dropbox & Amazon spring immediately to mind, current Microsoft doesn't), but the whole system depends intrinsically on maintaining the ignorance you write of.

How to extricate ourselves from all that? Personally, I'm for revolution to take it all down. But we know that isn't going to happen.

> hideous individual corporate citizens

I agree with you, that pointing fingers like is useless. We very quickly run out of fingers.

> I'm for revolution to take it all down.

I wonder what you mean by that.

> I wonder what you mean by that

I'm not entirely sure. If I had a recipe I'd probably be a leader somewhere rather than an anonymous sometime programmer in deepest Northern NSW!

One of the few things I'm pretty certain of though is that the capitalist-corporate system is a road to worldwide destruction. And that there are no diversions within the system, no reforms that can do anything other than alter the speed of the decline. It all has to go, by whatever means necessary. Though I'm open to the possibility that the course is a biological given, and capitalist-corporatism is merely a consequence of that biology. In which case, we're done.

Don't need to be the CEO of GitHub to answer that question.

Why? Because money.

more importantly why not?

github is not doing anything special to make ICE worse. the reasoning of divestment from disagreeable organizations is an individual right, but does not make sense to be adopted as a company policy to not work with LEO's.

being politically minded at a company is fine, but trying to shame companies into adopting your ideals is unrealistic and counterproductive for neutral tools like Github

> neutral tools like Github – DennisAleynikov

> “You can’t be neutral on a moving train,” I would tell them. Some were baffled by the metaphor, especially if they took it literally and tried to dissect its meaning. Others immediately saw what I meant: that events are already moving in certain deadly directions, and to be neutral means to accept that. ― Howard Zinn

They've stated that it's not actually that much money. Which makes the decision even more baffling. They could easily afford to drop the contract, but choose not to anyway.

Can you explain this position? If GitHub were funding their free teams product with revenue from, say, organized crime which is kidnapping children, would it be appropriate and on-topic to ask about that? But it's no longer appropriate when it's a government agency?

Is it just US government agencies, or would it be appropriate again to ask if the funding were coming from ISIS?

Also, is it generally the case that complaints about the NSA and their spying programs are off-topic for HN because they too are a US government agency? Or is that different?

Presumably ICE buys light bulbs. Should we also call out light bulb manufacturers and distributors for “working with ICE”?

It’s not about politics for me, but rather the viewpoint that companies shouldn’t be the moral police of their customers.

If they do so directly, then yes, most certainly.

I mean, I'm open to discussing whether we should or shouldn't, but I think it's not an off-topic discussion!

pretty off topic to bring up customers of a lightbulb factory to shame them for selling headlamps to tanks...

All right, point taken - this is a politically incorrect discussion and we should be self-censoring ourselves.

No, your comment just doesn't make sense. Lightbulb manufacturers are not responsible for wars because tanks have lightbulbs in them, and GitHub is not responsible for all the harm in the world either because some bad actors use GitHub.

Sorry, I can't even discuss this with you. I rather disagree - this is what the whole "military-industrial complex" is about - but it's off-topic and forbidden.

This is totally not what the "military-industrial complex" is about. Wow.

The MIC concept is a specific application of the general idea of regulatory capture of policymakers to the vertical of defence contracting. This is nothing like that: the corporation here isn't a defence contractor and they're not bribing the government. It fits 0%.

organized crime doesn't exist. governments are indeed allowed to commit organized crime as you said.

if you want to overthrow or change that government you are free to do so. revenue obtained from that government is as bloodstained as any capitalist money, and most sources of profit can be dismissed as exploitive. its quite literally the point of profits.

if github teams were funded by isis I literally would not change my opinion on github.

It's not really fair to compare selling tooling to a large agency that does a lot of different things with directly writing software that does something evil.

I made no such comparison.

whats stopping torture workstations from being managed with Kubernetes and Chef?

you could use any modern orchestration tools to replace humans running torture machinery. code only serves to automate human behavior not create new behavior that isn't just amplifications of humanities worst desires.

Arguable but irrelevant. I'm arguing against your absurd universal and inhuman suggestion (nay, command!) to keep politics out of the discussion. On the particular topic at hand I think I'm somewhat in agreement with your conclusion (though I'd need to reflect more to be sure).

You know what the Greeks would have thought about someone that doesn't care about politics? They'd think their best station in life would to be a slave.

but how does politics apply to such a boring tool like github? its like saying ICE shouldn't use Google Docs or Gimp...

its not a weapon or an advantage in actual human cruelty that furthers non altruistic goals.

That right they shouldn't because they engage human rights violations as a matter of policy.

but anyone including drug cartels are free to use github and google docs.

sure it might be against Googles policy on a technically but are you seriously suggesting crime orgs care about the TOS included with their burner android phones?

You are not making any kind of argument here.

Having common sense to not shitpost about politics in every unrelated thread is not the same as not caring about politics.