GitHub considered harmful

[Michael Gratton]

Alex, any comment on the below?

ICE killed two more people in detention in the last month: 
<https://www.ice.gov/death-detainee-report>

You sure we want to be benefiting from that?

//Mike

-- 
⊨ Michael Gratton, Percept Wrangler.
⚙ <http://mjog.vee.net/>

On Sun, 13 Oct, 2019 at 10:23, Michael Gratton <mike at vee.net> wrote:
> On Fri, 11 Oct, 2019 at 10:57, Alexander Larsson <alexl at redhat.com> 
> wrote:
>> 
>> Its already costing them money. They did a $500k donation to "offset"
>> the $200k causing it to be a net loss deal, and thats not even
>> considering all the bad PR they are already getting over this from
>> various sources.
> 
> Yes, but they still haven't cancelled the contract, so the response 
> so far clearly hasn't been enough.
> 
> 
>>>  You see how effective this is when (say) bigoted news readers say
>>>  something particularly heinous, such that people start contacting 
>>> their
>>>  advertisers and getting them to cancel ad their ad spend the show -
>>>  there's always a quick reversal.
>> 
>> Well, cancelling ads is very easy to do, and easy to reverse. A large
>> infrastructure reboot is not that easy, so it has to be considered
>> much more carefully.
> 
> Sure, and that's why I'm bringing it up, so it can be considered.
> 
> 
>> And there is also the question of what guarantees that the new host 
>> is
>> any better (see the link to gitllab policy in my other mail). In 
>> fact,
>> am I any better? I'm currently employed by the company that literally
>> tabulated the holocaust...
> 
> Right, which is why I suggested hosting on FDO's GitLab. It is much 
> less hassle for people using the service to move a self-hosted 
> service to a different host than it is to shift platforms entirely.
> 
> 
>> I find what ICE is doing reprehensible, and I would prefer if github
>> dropped ICE as a customer. But I realize the complexities of 
>> business,
>> and this contract is imho not something fundamental or defining of 
>> the
>> github organization either in terms of money or in moral values, nor
>> is it (I assume) a major thing for the ICE operational capabilities. 
>> I
>> also think that flatpak moving elsewhere will not really add a
>> significant effect to this particular case as this is already being
>> fought in a lot of ways.
> 
> As before, I disagree with all of the above. If significant projects 
> like Flat* migrate away from companies that are supporting ICE 
> operationally (in whatever capacity), and do so in a loud way such 
> that it's clear why they are moving, it puts an enormous amount of 
> pressure on these companies to drop that support. Further, it 
> discourages other companies from engaging with organisations like ICE 
> in the future, having a positive flow-on effect.
> 
> This sort of pressure works exceptionally well in the real world when 
> enough people care and buy in. For example, the 2014 Biennale of 
> Sydney, a major arts and cultural event of national significance in 
> Australia, was sponsored by Transfield, a company that was running 
> the Australian Federal government's offshore refugee concentration 
> camps. The Biennale's board was asked to drop the sponsorship, but 
> they refused. So participating artists and many others organised and 
> began to boycott the event. As the momentum of the boycott picked up, 
> the board relented and dropped the sponsorship, and later as a direct 
> result many other organisations did the same. It worked *very* well, 
> because enough people bought into it. In the end, Transfield stopped 
> running Australia's concentration camps, changed its name, and ended 
> up being bought out.
> 
> So I'm asking the project here to buy in, so that the existing 
> pressure and momentum can be kept up. It's inconvenient, but it's the 
> right thing to do: *Actual human beings are being harmed.*
> 
> So, for a concrete plan, how about this:
> 
> 1. Move development of Flatpak itself, the portals and related 
> projects (but not FlatHub app reops) to FDO's GitLab, provide some 
> documentation for people developing for Flatpak about how to migrate, 
> update existing documentation, announce the move and the reasons for 
> it widely so that people hear about it, and set the projects on 
> Github to be read-only.
> 
> The cost of this is low, since as Mathieu pointed out, the 
> repo/ticket/PR migrations can be easily done using existing tools, 
> people can log in to GitLab using their GitHub credentials, and 
> developers simply need to update their origin, and the number of 
> people actively developing for it are low.
> 
> 2. Start implementing support for GitLab (and other services?) in the 
> Flathub toolchain, so that Flathub-hosted apps can use FDO's GitLab, 
> the commercial GitLab service, or their others (GNOME's? KDE's?) as 
> they see fit.
> 
> 3. Once that's in place, move any Flathub apps that don't opt out to 
> FDO GitLab, or elsewhere as appropriate.
> 
> This would be low cost, high impact, and minimally disruptive.
> 
> //Mike
> 
> --
> ⊨ Michael Gratton, Percept Wrangler.
> ⚙ <http://mjog.vee.net/>
> 
> 
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