Posted on 06/21/2018 9:08:48 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Some programmers were a little wary when Microsoft bought the company-agnostic programming platform GitHub for $7.5 billion in early June.
Now, nearly 100 of them are threatening to leave unless Microsoft drops its contract with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, following widespread condemnation of the agency's actions to split up immigrant families at the US-Mexico border, but before President Trump signed his executive order reversing the ICE policy.
Microsoft was actually one of the tech companies that most strongly condemned ICE, in fact, and one of the first to take a stand, saying it was "dismayed" and later publishing blog posts from both CEO Satya Nadella and president Brad Smith on US immigration policy.
But Microsoft also had a reason to speak out early -- after a January blog post revealed the company was supplying ICE with Azure cloud services up to and including "deep learning capabilities to accelerate facial recognition and identification."
(In his blog post, CEO Satya Nadella explained Microsoft was merely "supporting legacy mail, calendar, messaging and document management workloads" for ICE with its Azure services, but he didn't address facial recognition.)
Microsoft's explanations apparently weren't enough for many of the company's own employees, who wrote a letter protesting the company's work with ICE, one that The Verge reports is up to 300 signatures now. And they don't appear to be enough for some GitHub coders.
Here's the full letter from GitHub's coders (via Gizmodo):
Tell Microsoft to drop ICE as a client or lose us as GitHub users
Earlier this year Microsoft proudly announced that it was working with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to "deliver such services as cloud-based identity and access" in order to "help employees make more informed decisions faster" and "utilize deep learning capabilities to accelerate facial recognition and identification." (Emphasis added.)
As members of the open source community and free software movement who embrace values of freedom, liberty, openness, sharing, mutual aid, and general human kindness, we are horrified by and strongly object to the Trump administration's policies of detainment, denaturalization, deportation, and family separation as carried out by ICE.
With Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub, many in the GitHub community were fearful of what new ownership from a company once openly hostile to open source would spell for the future of GitHub, and many of those people chose to leave the site rather than entrust Microsoft with their software. Those of us who remained, because we were willing to give Microsoft a chance to become a steward of the open source movement, will not continue to do so should Microsoft continue to abet the trampling of human and civil rights by this administration and its law enforcement agencies.
We call on Microsoft to end its relationship with ICE and any federal agencies engaged in enforcing the cruel policies of this administration, which is destroying families and jailing asylum seekers, undocumented long-term residents, and even naturalized citizens under threat of deportation. Or, we will simply take our projects elsewhere.
You can view the current list of signatures right here.
Microsoft didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
every one is replaceable, these computer geeks apparently don’t know that.
This is getting very ridiculous...
Yeah, I go to code monkeys for political insight. And rock stars, and actors.
Sorry
..no html... but...email addresses...haha... too lazy I am
The fraction of GitHub users represented by this dumb group is approximately equal to DBL_EPSILON.
I don’t think they will. Breach of contract with gov’t is not cheap.
You got that right. They can be easily replaced by illegal aliens. LOL.
Gasp! I’m drowning in a pool of words.
I’ll just lie on my back and keep treading through the currents.
**Meanwhile, those complainers are making it easy to replace them. My guess is some will realize that at the last moment, when they are asked (ordered!) to train their own replacements. Expect some attempts to sabotage the programs and introduce unnamed viruses into the Microsoft systems.
That, and some good old fashioned Doxxing of supervisors.
I work in the geek industry ... It’s amazing how many people think that a company will close up the moment they leave. What tends to happen is productivity increases the moment they’re gone.
Microsoft is foolish if they pay this any close attention.
they will get new coders. Also their are a lot of agencies that have contracts with this CO so if they do not fulfill the contract, they go on a naughty list that every agency can see.
Microsoft will do some sort of meaningless PR stunt to make the snowflakes happy and then tell to get back to work.
If anyone can rustle up a hundred coders quickly, it is Microsoft.
On a broader note though, if this kind of thing is going to continue, tech companies in general are going to need to diversify their exposure away from hyper-partisan work forces like that in San Francisco/Silicon Valley.
Utah has a pretty good software industry, and those kids can pass a drug test.
blackmailing a company is a federal crime isn’t it?
Same goes for Dallas/Ft Worth, Des Moines, etc.
Bye Felicia.
Scanning through that list of names....
I bet a lot of them are H-1-B visa holders....
And I wonder how many have overstayed their visa.
100 people. Wow. How will they ever overcome that loss of business.
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