zlacker

>>Xordev+(OP)
“Thank you for the question. Respectfully, we’re not going to be reconsidering this,” he said on the videoconference call. “Picking and choosing customers is not the approach that we take to these types of questions when it comes to influencing government policy.”

Sounds reasonable. Imo GitHub should be a neutral platform rather than trying to deny service to those they don't agree with. I'm sure electricity and internet companies have lots of contracts with the ICE, no one criticizes that because those are utilities which aren't expected to descriminate based on the views and actions of their customers. I think there is value in having platforms like GitHub with the same approach, you shouldn't have to worry about your code being taken down because it doesn't match the values of a private company. Once you start denying certain customers based on their actions, you implicitly support the actions of all of your other customers, which quickly becomes a very difficult position to be in.

>>GhostV+5a1
I agree that making decisions like this puts the company in a bad position and is risky for them. But it's not like GitHub can suddenly pull the plug on ICE and instantly delete all their code; no data will be lost. There are plenty of alternatives to GitHub so ICE doesn't have to worry about their code being taken down, beyond the small cost of migrating to another service. You can't say the same about the traditional utilities which are normally granted a monopoly.