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.
Sell 10 Commodore 64s?
Why wait for them to leave. Fire everyone of them.
and H1B’s...
I wonder if anyone in this coding group cares enough about refugee families to house some in their personal home at their own expense. Noooooo. Just like the Pope, Bono, Trudeau, UN and EU big shots, grandstanding US politicians, it is “do as I say, not as I do”.
Looks like a culling of the Github herd is in order.
Just close GitHub and lay off those disloyal workers.
Getting rid of 100 smucks at a time is a “WIN” even though I don’t like Microsoft. Lots of newbies from El Salvador and Honduras need high-paying tech jobs NOW.
lol. oh the irony!!!! ;D
“Tell Microsoft to drop ICE as a client”
Tell Microsoft to quit monkeying around with Windows and applications.
I’ve been in the IT industry my whole life and I don’t recognize a single name on that list.
Lotta foreign names on that list of signatories.
I sent the list ICE for visa status verification.
Thing is, he was a good coder (better than me for sure), but not outstanding. And his caustic personality, lack of people skills and unkempt appearances weren't in his favor either.
Not to mention being overweight and severely unathletic. Some of these guys remove everything except coding from their lives in order to rationalize their own flaws and feel superior to people who have other advantages.
Replace them with coders from India and China.
A win-win solution.
At much less pay...stupid gits...no pun intended.
Fire each one and replace them with.....immigrants or cheap Indian coders.
Oh the humanity!
I know some of these people.
Many are not even Americans.
Their understanding of the issue is from CNN International and the BBC.
the insanity never ends...
Wow. They were not protesting when facial recognition was meant against Americans or when Obama was doing worse
He uneducated American gets reeducated one media bull sht precedent making after another. Talk about mind control
GitHub is not a company, it’s a site that hosts open source software. If Microsoft closes it, it will just open again somewhere else. IMO, that would be a good thing — the archenemy of open source doesn’t need to be owning the home of most open source projects.
Yes, the names give away a lot...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.