Engineer Pulls Off His Code Off Github To Fight “Evil” ICE

The engineer, Seth Vargo, pulled his open-source code off Github when he found out that the company using his code worked with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. With him pulling off his code from the repository hosting device, the company, enterprise software company Chef, discovered that without Vargo’s code, their business stopped working.

Vargo had worked for the Seattle-based company, but he didn’t know about the contract with ICE until tech writer Shanley Kane tweeted about it on Monday. ICE, which was formed under the presidency of George W. Bush in 2003, has stirred protests as it ratcheted up deportation and family separation policies under President Donald Trump.

Vargo reached out to Chef executives to better understand their rationale for the ICE contract, but got no response for three days. “It became apparent that they had no interest in acknowledging their partnership with ICE — the organization best known for tearing apart families and locking children in cages,” Vargo wrote in a text conversation with The Verge.

… he decided to pull the open-source project off Github. He knew the company would notice, but he was surprised to find out it relied on his code so heavily that it began experiencing significant downtimes at once.

More details of this news over at The Verge.

What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: Comfreak/ Pixabay)

props to the Google Engineer who yanked code from Chef for working with ICE. You've made my job harder today, but I really don't mind.
— marea rosa (@smrt_fasizmu) September 19, 2019

Comments (4)

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Um, actually the article is entirely correct. These policies may have started under Obama, but they were RATCHETED up by Trump and protests against ICE largely started only after that point. But nice try to preach that trademark whataboutism that Trump fans all adore so much.

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"Vargo had worked for the Seattle-based company, but he didn’t know about the contract with ICE until tech writer Shanley Kane tweeted about it on Monday. ICE, which was formed under the presidency of George W. Bush in 2003, has stirred protests as it ratcheted up deportation and family separation policies under President Donald Trump."...this statement in the article is INCORRECT. Those policies preceeded Trump, and were in fact put into high gear by Obama.

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Sounds like Chef didn't really know what they were doing. If you rely one a code base from your application, then you need to create a local repository for just this reason.

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You can't just expect to use someone else's code for free forever. If your business depends on it, or you make a profit, you need to pay for your own copy or at least pay for a maintenance contract. Too many people make their creations open source because they are proud of it, and that's great for many reasons, but there's always someone who will exploit your work for profit.