They've abandoned GitHub for Codeberg because GitHub has ICE as a customer. Codeberg uses Paypal which is a member of the ICE "Virtual Global Taskforce".
There is a purity spiral that organizations can enter when they start doing this, which ends up with you shoving yourself into a cold dark corner of the internet and still not being completely detached from the badness because Cisco provides infrastructure for nearly every major weapons manufacturer and defense department globally.
> There is a purity spiral that organizations can enter when they start doing this
You are the one summoning that spiral by making a cheap gotcha wrt codeberg using Paypal.
The project apparently could and did move because the swith from github to codeberg wasn't that big of an impact, and because, while the new forge is not perfect, they feel the association is less severe. There is no "purity spiral" in that, just a pragmatic choice factoring in ethics.
Right, that seemed like a minor issue. There was also the minor issue of the increase of AI code PRs. Seems like the greater issue was a perception of deterioration of the platform (in their sites for years) and a reasonable path towards migration to another platform.
As I was reading your reply I was half convinced that it was not purity spiral but by the end, even you admit it’s an ethics thing so yeah it is pretty much purity spiral in place. Next they will leave the USA so that they won’t be associated with Trump.
Practicality matters. For example, even if you choose not to harm other living things, you cannot avoid stepping on and killing the occasional insect. Theoretically you might be able to do it, but you’ll stop having a life. But you can still do much in line with your beliefs, such as not killing animals for food.
If GitHub were the sole game in town, maybe (probably) they wouldn’t have switched. But it isn’t, and they found something which in their view is an acceptable replacement and less worse. So yeah, maybe they don’t ethically agree with everyone on every thing up the chain, but they apparently agree with them more. That matters. You take a stand where you are able to.
You are making an ethical judgment when you say, in essence, that 'it is wrong for businesses (and non-profits) to attempt to act in an ethical manner, aligned with their mission statement'.
Making an ethical argument about the purposelessness and futility of ethics is... interesting to say the least. Please, consider stopping the internet today and instead spend time with a book on ethics that you think agrees with you sensibilities, and then look at this situation again.
Do you see a difference between 'signaling virtue' and 'having virtue and living in accordance with those virtues'?
People that use the former like a slur seem to need to believe that the latter cannot be true.
I wouldn't want to live in a world like that personally, assuming nefarious intention behind every good act (people in positions of highest power excepted). It seems exhausting.
Andrew Kelley means what he says and says what he means (in an on-the-spectrum way). It makes him off-putting and charming in equal measure, depending on the issue. But you shouldn't assume that this is a mere 'signal', it is what he believes.
Speaking for myself, I do disassociate myself from unethical products and people. It's not always as soon as I'd like, Amazon being a good example. I've never regretted doing so.
It's not even worth bragging about, who would even care? I just despise lying, and if I want to believe that I behave ethically without lying to myself, this is the natural consequence.
I think there's a difference between providing services to X and a platform using a payment processor that collaborates with X.
You have a point, of course, but for many options, the best we can do is avoid the worst one as there's no perfect solution. I'm not saying that people should leave GitHub because of this, but I can see why some would and why they may pick a different, still not perfect, alternative instead of doing everything themselves.
There's nothing that compels you to "purity spiral" other than attempting to appease cynics who insist that all decisions must be completely binary and consistent, with no room for nuance or practicality, and that anything else is virtue signaling (which is somehow less defensible than enabling harm in the first place).
Reducing harm where feasible is still meaningful, and certainly better than no attempt at all.
I feel like that's the whole point of the OP. I agree with the overall post but mentioning the ICE relationship seems to detract from the main point.
"I hate GitHub because X Y and Z features are bad" is a good reason to move away; "I hate GitHub because one of their thousands of enterprise customers does not align with my political views" is not, in my opinion.
People protesting ICE do not do so out of political concern, but humanitarian concern.
This seems like a minor nitpick as those two are intimately tangled up, but it matters to make the distinction. Standing up for others is not petty or self-serving and that's exactly what this sort of conflation can falsely imply.
Just because people have a revolutionary fetish and fantasize about being the ones to stop Hitler in 1933 (they would not have) does not make their delusions a reality. These dorks make anti-establishment vibes so lame. Just because you say something doesn’t make it real.
Hello there (new-account){name}{number}! When did you discover that {you, a real person} believed that the only way to protect the {women!} and {children!} was this new agency founded under Bush in the wake of 9/11?
Did you know that all {women!} (over 12 million every year) are actually most endangered by their intimate partners, who are predominately within their same race and class?
Do you think this is more or less concerning than this inflammatory anecdata you've created an account to provide? Do you think that domestic violence prevention (less than 1 billion) should be more or less well-funded than ICE (170 billion)?
> (Under the Trump admin): Teams responsible for violence prevention have been decimated, and a reorganization of the Department of Health and Human Services has eliminated divisions wholesale.
It's virtue signaling plain and simple. People who crafted their identities around the current thing in ~2017 are religiously attached to having to be part of the in group and can't let it go, and it inevitably bubbles up like this.
This will no doubt rankle those who align with that group, but they are a pathetic remnant of a terrible period of rampant sociopathy.
Though you will no doubt assume you're getting downvoted because you're speaking truth to sociopaths, I just wanted to say I'm downvoting you because your comment violates multiple HN guidelines. Reminder, those are here:
It's disappointing to see such a long-term community member engage so thoughtlessly. I know the guidelines also say I should just flag and move on, but this will only reenforce your narrative, and I am hoping to break the cycle.
Politics in the US is so extremely binarized these days that I think it’s hard to assign motive for political issues beyond “my friends say that our team feels this way.” Which I would argue is much more political than anything fundamental.
If they had not mentioned github's association with ICE,
then we'd be in a situation where everyone would be questioning whether or not the relationship had anything to do with the decision.
You got one. And how many good neighbors were dragged out of their cars, how many parents torn from their children, and how many American citizens wrongly harassed or dragged out of their houses for it? How many preachers praying peacefully in the streets were shot in the head?
This is not, and has never been, about the murderers. The murderers are the excuse, the people who are actually being harassed and brutalized are not them. And as mentioned, many of them are American citizens.
You can support sane border policies without also supporting racial profiling, the militarization of our cities and warrantless searches and detention. These two things don’t have to be mutually exclusive, but arguably much of what ICE has represented recently is what many people would consider to be unconstitutional behavior.
Ok, if you want to go down this road, should I start posting articles of religious leaders caught raping children? Should we be spending 170 billion a year trying to shut down all churches?
One or the biggest ironies in US politics to me is the complaints about the degradation of the rule of law in this country under Trump. While simultaneously arguing that federal immigration law should be actively ignored and blocked by cities and states. Of course the details are all messy and complicated. But if you feel both of those things are true, you owe it to yourself to take a moment and reflect on the irony of your own views. Empathy for people you disagree with is in dangerously short supply these days and is fundamental to a functioning democracy.
It seems like every organization in America is compromised in some way if you dig deep enough. Certainly you can find reasons for every big tech. There's still a balance to be struck though.
> It seems like every organization in America is compromised in some way if you dig deep enough.
I agree, and my view is that it goes much further. Quoting author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.".
This is indeed the virtue signaling trap. It then calls into question of if such public figures or organizations are really as ethical, as they claim to be or if the reason given is actually valid.
Especially, upon further scrutiny, if that leadership is involved in dirt or makes conflicting statements. The uncovered hypocrisy or deception, greatly undermines public trust and how the foundation is viewed.
You're mad because they left a vendor because they switched to a different vendor that you think is just as bad but also you're accusing them of starting an "inevitable purity spiral?" Which one is it?
https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/top-story-industry-partner...
There is a purity spiral that organizations can enter when they start doing this, which ends up with you shoving yourself into a cold dark corner of the internet and still not being completely detached from the badness because Cisco provides infrastructure for nearly every major weapons manufacturer and defense department globally.