This raised the question in my mind: is the author being dishonest, or does he just have a different perspective and different values than me? Or alternately, h

This raised the question in my mind: is the author being dishonest, or does he just have a different perspective and different values than me? Or alternately, have I not thought through my own values sufficiently to see that I should expect the same outcome as he does? If I assume the author is being honest, the rationale must be something like this. The Chinese government is a serial human-rights violator. Most recently, it has been known to put people into reeducation camps on the basis of having a minority religious affiliation, but that's just one of many examples. Companies ought not sell to or provide services for human rights violators. This restriction should apply transitively as much as is reasonably possible. Now, given that there is a company in this foundation that is working with the Chinese government, it is reasonable to anticipate that the efforts of the foundation would benefit the Chinese government. Therefore, all of the other companies that are participating in the foundation are tainted by transitivity. They should either oust the one company working with China, or else themselves leave the foundation. I'm not sure where my agreement with this author breaks down, but it is somewhere before his conclusion. For me, the big question is how open standards and software jive with this transitive interpretation of moral responsibility. Anyone working on OpenCV or TensorFlow is working on something that could reasonably be anticipated to assist the Chinese government in the repression of its citizens. Same goes for anyone who publishes in the ML space. But I think the idea that one should not do these things is absurd, so I think a line needs to be drawn somewhere, and that line is far short of Google's or IBM's participation in this foundation. That said, I think I could be convinced that companies working mainly with the Chinese government should not be allowed to sit on the foundation. But I'm not sure even of that.