So the developer already had left the company but one of his own Open Source code hosted on his personal github was used in production by Chef Customers ? Really ? That is just Wow. I don't have any strong opinions on whether he did the right thing but this absolutely surprises me. Running a small company, I am very strict against any of us using any personal accounts for anything that impacts our company work especially production. This has to be a no no by default I would assume.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/23/npm_left_pad_chaos/
I’m put off by the statement: “I want to be clear that this decision is not about contract value—it is about maintaining a consistent and fair business approach in these volatile times,” he wrote. “I do not believe that it is appropriate, practical, or within our mission to examine specific government projects with the purpose of selecting which U.S. agencies we should or should not do business.”
I hear about practicality all the time at my office and sometimes it’s real and sometimes it’s laziness. This sounds like a little of both but also profit motivated (not saying that’s wrong for a for-profit company).
Interested in your options on code of ethics and the above.
If you think that ICE is so uniquely bad that they specifically need to be boycotted, that makes sense. Without inviting any debate on whether it's true, it's a consistent position that can be reasonably applied.
But if we ignore the meaningfulness or truthfulness of the statement, let's take two hypothetical societies. In one society people agree to cooperate and trade with others when there's a mutual self interest, even if they happen to despise their partner otherwise. In the other society, people engage in a substantial degree of scrutiny and only trade and cooperate with others whom they are meaningfully aligned with. Which society do you think would have the better outcomes for whichever metrics you might imagine? I'd start with economic/technological progress, war vs peace, tribal vs unified (not to say homogeneous) society, etc.
I think there is a clear answer to my hypothetical, but perhaps people see things differently. I'd be quite curious to know how.
Humans have to make moral choices about where they personally draw the line and where they draw the boundary. Around the organisation that falsely imprisons Americans and runs concentration camps seems like a starting point.
Those numbers seem very low. Is this just for one year or one contract?
Any large organization has many people with the authority to spend money, and each one of those transactions will be supported by a contract.
The contracts are generally for specific products or services, for a specific time. High-level agencies have a great deal of autonomy and also get to pull their needs out of their own budgets. Lower-level elements within an agency (a NASA center, for example) can also have more or less autonomy.
edit: Looks like they were public gems, but in general it's always good advice to consult a lawyer before disrupting commercial or public systems.
Good way of making sure no one ever contributes to FOSS again.
I agree that keeping children in cages is not good, but there are solutions. If ice had a bigger budget maybe it could have more beds, larger cells, better food. I don't see how removing enforcement is a solution.
Come on, man.
I suspected a small percentage of people with a hard, runtime dependency would be impacted, but I did not know Chef (the software) had a hard runtime dependency and was pulling that dependency from public RubyGems instead of a mirror they control.
It seems more effective to donate $2,800 to pick-a-democrat. Or Mark Sanford.
I think leaving a job is a better protest than doing damage to your employer. And perhaps for his next contract, he might insert a clause limiting what his code can be used for. In limiting the utility of the code he sells, I expect he'd be taking a lesser pay rate for it.
I haven't read many OSS licenses. Can't someone just publish an 'unethical' fork and life goes on?
Chef now has the repo ‘forked’ in to their GitHub account: https://github.com/chef/chef-sugar
I never received money from the code in question, but I’m still doing my personal best to offset impact.
You either don't protest or you're very bad at it
