zlacker

Providing standard, regular service to anyone willing to pay for it is almost always the "default" non-political way of doing business. Do you want an ideological purity test to buy a bagel or a car? Refusing to provide a service when you have the capacity to provide it is a much stronger political act because it essentially implies "I hate you so much that I'm willing to harm myself (foregoing profit) in order to thereby harm you."

>>NE2z2T+(OP)
I'm sorry, but with power comes responsibility. The poor little CEOs are going to have to recognize that their decisions have consequences, and those consequences must be thought through. They don't just get to play Capitalist without any repercussions because they call themselves non-political.

If you have power, you are responsible for what happens with it. It's not just free money.

>>seph-r+t1
And if you don't get your way, what's next? Shutting off ICE employee's water, electricity, and telephone service? And why not kick them out of their apartments too since sheltering an ICE officer helps enable them.

>>NE2z2T+r5
No one is going for ICE employees, at least in this thread. They are proposing going against ICE as an institution.

>>NE2z2T+(OP)
There is almost no such thing as standard contracts in b2b and especially business-to-government segments. You'd best believe that ICE has a special contract that it negotiated with GitHub/MS, and it would not be out of the ordinary for the terms to have been influenced by political favors at some level of the negotiation.

>>NE2z2T+r5
This isn't about me getting my way. I'm just very, very opposed to the idea of someone wielding massive amounts of power without it being a burden. Power is burdensome because it means responsibility. If you just want just the power but not the responsibility, you're being a parasite. It's not okay.

>>tsimio+57
ICE as an institution doesn’t even know what Github is, and they won’t blink an eye if suddenly it goes away. It’s ICE engineers lives which are suddenly miserable because they would have to deal with setting up new systems and processes for source control and bug tracking on top of whatever else they were working on.

Cutting off GitHub access to ICE engineers is like sitting outside their offices banging pots and pans together for a few weeks. A lot of people are generally worse off for a short while, GitHub revenue goes down, maybe they lay off a few engineers who were supporting that customer, a few news articles are written alternatively praising another step towards corporate activism or bemoaning cancel culture.

The most important part of convincing GitHub to cancel ICE to those who are rooting for it isn’t so much ICE losing access to GitHub, but another drop in the bucket toward normalizing the politicization and disruption of basic services to deplorable customers.