We're a team that moves quickly and is receptive to ideas and opinions. I'm very proud of that.
Worse, it looks like you just reversed direction because the Register made fun of you. You went from being willing to work with all organisations to reserving the right to drop any organisation on a whim. I wonder, what does Gitlab believe exactly?
You aren't the CEO but apparently the actual CEO lets you set global sales policy, so perhaps you can illustrate with some examples how your new-new policy will work.
I ask because the edited policy looks more like a personal speech code than something designed for companies. Do software development organisations routinely "encourage violence towards protected groups"? They don't, in my experience. So which organisations did you have in mind when writing it? Who exactly will you refuse to do business with now who would have been served before? You list some categorisations that look quite vague and state it's not a full list.
For example, in recent times certain political factions have argued that immigration control is violence against protected groups: can you clarify if you do/would sell Gitlab to ICE?
Honestly, you could submit and merege request to our handbook to change global sales policy and tag our CEO to review and merge if he agrees :) Admittedly, this is a unique way to run a company. Other companies are limited by only getting ideas from a small group of people that are directors and executives. At GitLab we understand that good ideas can come from anywhere and we embrace that.
Ultimately the values of a company must come from the CEO, as he is the only person who can enforce them. Your CEO can and does decide what the policy is, the fact that he uses PRs to do so is a distraction. But it appears he either doesn't know what he believes or his beliefs are so weak that criticism from some random journalist or marketing woman is sufficient to change them completely.
We currently use GitHub. Microsoft isn't perfect but its position on selling to customers is pretty well established: they sell to anyone who uses computers, and always have. Satya Nadella does not reverse his companies policies because someone filed a pull request. This is reassuring. I don't want to ever be in a situation where Chrissie Buchanan, a blog writer of no importance at all, gets to influence our business relationships because who the hell knows when she might decide that her personal "values" don't include doing business with us? What even are her values? She refuses to explain when asked: just more evidence GitLab makes it up as it goes along.
I have nothing against your software. Other than the fact you're a distributed company and make a GitHub competitor, I didn't know much or have any opinions about you before this incident. But frankly this looks astonishingly unprofessional. Businesses want certainty and you give none.