US ICE Contract with GitHub Sparks Developer Protests | Hacker News Reader

US ICE Contract with GitHub Sparks Developer Protests

theatlantic.com

41 pointsthrow0101a33 comments

Who is going to choose who the good / bad people / companies / institutions are? Activists?

You cannot (even in good faith) deny certain groups access without undermining our societies. E. g. denying certain groups human rights is not acceptable. Even murderers have to have a fair trial and most countries don't allow the death penalty because human rights apply to everyone.

It's the same with open source. Once you deny access to certain groups, it's not _free_ anymore. It's politized. As a german I've learned a lot about where exclusion of certain groups and people lead. Who is the good guys? From my grandparents generation POV the bad guys where the "greedy jews" and they were the good. From my POV the reverse is true.

Values have to be universal, even if you don't like the other side. You don't have to like ICE, but either you stand with your values or you don't.

We have a system for determining these kinds of questions - the courts. It's not the open source community's responsibility to make sure other organizations are behaving ethically.

If people believe ICE has broken laws and violated human rights they should be pursuing a trial, not attacking the organization's ability to host Git repos.

The courts deal with what's legal and illegal rather than what's right or wrong or ethical or unethical.

This situation appears to be a case where people are trying to use free market pressure to influence companies to not do business with those they deem doing something wrong or unethical rather than illegal.

> If people believe ICE has broken laws and violated human rights they should be pursuing a trial

That would require a fair and balanced court system which the US lacks.

This is the same kind of justification for taking the law into your own hands because you don't think that the justice system will do its job.

What is the contract for? The common open source licenses certainly don't fit with the idea of blacklisting organizations from using them. ICE is probably on the tamer end of governmental organizations using open source too, I'd imagine every intelligence agency and terrorist organization in the world uses some open source code and software.

ICE uses a GitHub Enterprise Server.

> “Just as Microsoft for more than three decades has licensed Microsoft Word without demanding to know what customers use it to write, we believe it would be wrong for GitHub to demand that software developers tell us what they are using our tools to do,” Friedman wrote. If you place restrictions on who can use open source, is it still open?

That is the whole beauty and danger of open source, in that it empowers developers and users. It is up to the developers and users of open source to decide how they use that power.

I strongly believe in the four essential freedoms, especially "(0) The freedom to run the program as you wish, for whatever purpose."

To blacklist organizations from using open source would violate this.

If we allow developers/contributors to add conditions on who can use their code (ICE), or for what purposes it can be used (Can't be for immigration), then we establish a bad precedent. Just think of how many other passionate causes there are today. What if a conservative developer wants to prevent the DNC from using their code?

If you believe open source code is being used maliciously, then you should use the tools your society gives you to protest/shut it down rather than change the meaning of open source.

> open source’s commitment to “inverting power structures and creating access and opportunities for everyone.”

I’m pretty sure the current reality is open source reinforcing power structures. Only large companies with deep pockets can maintain open source, and they do so to forward some strategy.

Even if open source was committed to “inverting existing power structures” (I don’t think it ever was), the only power structures it would ever be able to influence would be profit-driven corporations: with open source equivalents to commercial software, corporations have to work harder to compete and commit to more transparency. Being able to see and modify software source code is completely unrelated to government functions.

In December, Schneeman signed an open letter alongside 2,000 other open-source contributors, who called the ICE contract a betrayal of open source’s commitment to “inverting power structures and creating access and opportunities for everyone.”

I'm pretty sure I remember an "even if an evil dictator wants to use it to murder babies" as a quick sanity check for whether a proposed license is actually open.

In response to the GitHub fracas, the developer Coraline Ada Ehmke introduced the Hippocratic License—named for the Hippocratic oath—which caveats traditional open-source licensing with restrictions on uses that “actively and knowingly endanger, harm, or otherwise threaten the physical, mental, economic, or general well-being of underprivileged individuals or groups.” But the Open Source Initiative rejected it. “Giving everyone freedom means giving evil people freedom, too,” reads its abridged definition of open source.

Yep.

The obvious problem here is that in this case open source software is being used to take away other people's freedoms.

So who's freedom wins out? ICE's freedom to use open source code, or ICE's victims' freedom?

The activists think that the victims' freedom should win, and I'd argue that's the case. ICE is using open source software to prevent other people from using open source software by locking them up.

The freedom to use open source software should stop at limiting other people's freedom to use it.

"Your Liberty To Swing Your Fist Ends Just Where My Nose Begins"

> The freedom to use open source software should stop at limiting other people's freedom to use it.

Since the people protesting ICE's use of open source software, are trying to limit ICE's freedom to use open source software, then they should not be able to use open source software.

Fair enough point, but it doesn't make a whole lot of sense in the real world.

It's like saying, "the guys killing Nazis are just as bad as the Nazis - they're both killing people."

I mean sure, but if nobody killed the Nazis in WWII where would we be today?

Or another example, kidnapping is illegal, but it's good for a police officer to "kidnap" (arrest) a kidnapper to get them stop kidnapping, right? The way your looking at it, the police officer is just as bad as the original kidnapper.

Your example is bad because it mistakes arrest for kidnapping, when the two are different actions.

The obvious problem here is that in this case open source software is being used to take away other people's freedoms.

Not really, there's no reason to consider that distinct from using it to kill people or whatever other problematic behavior.

Trying to pick "bad" things to proscribe makes a license fundamentally not open.

I'm reminded that JS Lint used a derivative of the MIT License that included "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil."

This turned out to be a problem for the project. Who gets to define good and evil?

In the case of the Hippocratic License I can imagine it running into similar problems.

> “actively and knowingly endanger, harm, or otherwise threaten the physical, mental, economic, or general well-being of underprivileged individuals or groups.”

How is underprivileged measured? What happens when an underprivileged group is no longer in that class? Does the use of the software then change?

This matters not just for how people feel about it but in a legal sense since a license is a legal document.

> Coraline Ada Ehmke introduced the Hippocratic License—named for the Hippocratic oath—which caveats traditional open-source licensing with restrictions on uses that “actively and knowingly endanger, harm, or otherwise threaten the physical, mental, economic, or general well-being of underprivileged individuals or groups.”

What is the logic in limiting that to "underprivileged individuals or groups"? If someone individual or group is not "underprivileged" its OK to knowingly harm their physical, mental, economic, or general well-being?

If you have limited resources, it’s alright to say you will only defend those who cannot already defend themselves.

I'm having trouble seeing how writing into a license a prohibition on harming all individuals or groups would take more resources than writing in a prohibition only on harming underprivileged individuals or groups.

I think it's related to how different humans have different priorities and thought processes, and so they don't all follow strict utilitarianism.

> ...called the ICE contract a betrayal of open source’s commitment to “inverting power structures and creating access and opportunities for everyone.”

Hmm, interesting. I always saw open-source from a freedom and power angle. I have a program, I should be able to edit it. I never saw it in a social justice angle of "inverting power structures". It may well be the case that having Linux be GPL helps Amazon more than me and entrenches power structures and I'd still not be upset because it does help me.

Yes this is a re-interpretation. Like encryption systems it was considered “turnkey” in that we wouldn’t care who used the technology from spies, lovers, to terrorists. But now it’s getting politicized like everything else.

The open source movement is explicitly about power: who gets to (legally) copy/see/modify/distribute/etc.

So it's always fun to see these demands to "keep politics out of it". If you did not see that is was nothing but politics before, it's because you don't notice the politics when you agree with them.

That doesn't mean the analogy you are quoting is entirely valid or meaningful: OSS is pretty close to communism in it's "from each what they can, to each according to their needs". But it's easy to see that zero marginal costs are required for this to work.

Oh no, I'm not asking to "keep politics out of it". The politics are most definitely part of it, but like everything else, they very narrowly specify the politics: "Code must be free. If you have a binary, you should have the right to edit it.". That's a really wise political angle and I'm grateful for all the people who made it possible.

But it doesn't take a position on abortion or immigration or anything and I prefer it that way.

To be clear, I recognize the right for free people to protest companies. I recognize the right for employees to protest their employers' dealings with companies.

This is so silly. So activists don't want ICE to use Github. Great, they can just use

- Gitlab - Google Cloud Code - Bitbucket - Sourceforge - Azure Repos - Oracle Developer Cloud - IBM Cloud - AWS Code Commit - Adobe Cloud Manager Repository

There are so many options and a lot of these companies love to work with the US Government

It’s not about just that for these kind of people. What they want to do is parade around and display (virtual signal) that they are morally superior. It’s almost poetic, really. They’re upset that an organization known for deporting illegal aliens is doing their job. That’s really what it’s about. They want open borders and think everyone is entitled to live in the US. Judging from the photo posted, it’s exactly the kind of demographic I’d expect. This is #woke culture in a nutshell. I fully support any tech company wanting to work with the government.

Many threads:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

What do these GitHub protesters imagine is the end-game? ICE goes to GitLab?

Is that not a reasonable end game for them? Some folks want to be able to say, "My work doesn't support ICE". If ICE has to move to an alternative, then those devs can continue to build and not support ICE.

Presumably they want to abolish ICE entirely, as has been widely called for.[1] Pressuring technology companies to not work with them is just one tactic in the movement.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolish_ICE

Or just use Git without Github - Git is free and open source. Or use Subversion. All these protesters are actually doing is _hurting_ open source by removing a revenue source that could be funneled into improving other open source projects. Unless they’re going to follow this line of thinking to its logical conclusion of creating a special NGGPL (non-government GPL) license and preventing government agencies from using open source projects.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com