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> I don't wan't some git hosting startup to be the arbiter of morality for society. The engineers, designers, and PMs shouldn't have an outsized voice in societ

> I don't wan't some git hosting startup to be the arbiter of morality for society. The engineers, designers, and PMs shouldn't have an outsized voice in society because they have a specialized useful skillset and ended up on a successful product Refusing to serve a customer when you disagree with that customer's goal is pretty far from being a "moral arbiter for society." Keep in mind that anyone is free to use other services (or roll their own) and gitlab can't do anything about that. Neither would it be overreaching for the workers building that product to request a say in how it's used. > If these users are breaking laws, then put them out of business via the courts and sieze the assets (the repos in this case) via legal means. Refusing someone a service you provide is a completely legal action. This has never been illegal afaik. In many cases I can think of the users wouldn't be actually breaking any laws, which isn't the same as saying that their actions aren't immoral. > The tech unicorns screwed themselves over BIG TIME, the second they stopped claiming they were just infrastructure and platforms and got into content moderation. They will now forever be a pawn of whoever has some power and has some agenda. In this last sentence, who are you claiming has power? It seems to me if I had power I wouldn't bother trying to persuade my boss not to do business with certain agencies, I'd just make it illegal and force them to change. Does that seem like a course of action available to gitlab employees?

madrox 7y ago
> Refusing to serve a customer when you disagree with that customer's goal is pretty far from being a "moral arbiter for society." This sounds really good until someone refuses to bake a wedding cake for a couple because they're gay. The supreme court ruled in favor of the baker. You're advocating for a world where that's ok. Is that the world you want to live in?
- kelnos 7y ago
  I think these bakers suck, but I do agree with the Supreme Court. A private business should be allowed to refuse to serve customers for whatever reason they choose. The only exception should be legal monopolies; they shouldn't be allowed to discriminate, because there are otherwise no other options.
  - dTal 7y ago
    Hah, ninja'd. We wrote the same comment, except mine's longer.
  - dmode 7y ago
    What about refusing to serve black people ? This was literally the premise of civil rights.
    - inlined 7y ago
      And the “but for” argument should have clearly applied here. They would not be denied a cake but for the gender (protected class) of who they were marrying. This was a clear case of judicial reinterpretation to meet an agenda.
      - greglindahl 7y ago
        Doesn't Colorado explicitly ban discrimination against gay people?
    - kelnos 7y ago
      Refusing to serve black people is illegal discrimination. It sucks that sexual orientation isn't a protected class in all states, but the bakers are legally clear here.
    - klyrs 7y ago
      30, if not 3 years ago, this wouldn't even be a question. If somebody argues that the refusal is based on religious grounds, it seems like it would be a relevant test case in US politics.
  - radarsat1 7y ago
    > A private business should be allowed to refuse to serve customers for whatever reason they choose. So you're fine with "whites only" signs in shops? Hope that doesn't sound too extreme but while I understand where you're coming from I think it's important to acknowledge where the rhetoric about not distinguishing your customers based on their personal characteristics comes from.
- anarchodev 7y ago
  I'm not so worried about the supreme court ruling -- businesses don't usually succeed or fail based on the justices ruling that their business model isn't technically illegal. I want to live in a world where the community embraces good things, and actively rejects fascists and bigots whether or not it's legal to do so.
- bcrosby95 7y ago
  Same sex marriage wasn't even recognized in Colorado at the time. Your ire would be better directed elsewhere, such as the state where the action they wanted to celebrate wasn't legal. Especially a state where you can penalize someone for not baking a cake for an event that isn't legal in the first place. The whole case was a ridiculous hit job.
  - greglindahl 7y ago
    People buy wedding cakes for handfastings, renewals of wedding vows, and many other kinds of ceremonies somewhat like a wedding but not legally a wedding, such as the sham weddings that people hold after being married by a justice of the peace at a courthouse. People even buy them to use on stage during theater productions. That's not actually at issue in the Colorado case. "I will not sell you that cake because you're gay" is the issue, not the type of cake.
    - Bendingo 7y ago
      > "I will not sell you that cake because you're gay" is the issue, not the type of cake. This contradicts everything I've read about the case. The baker disagreed with gay marriage, not being gay. To suggest that the baker wouldn't have sold any cake to a gay customer is ridiculous.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- dTal 7y ago
  Is this a rhetorical question? Yes, it is the world I want to live in. If the business operates within the context of healthy competition, then while they are free to refuse service, others are equally free to boycott it. This democratizes social norms. I don't want to force gun shops to sell to people they have a bad feeling about (say, because they have a racist tattoo), and I don't want a law that attempts to distinguish between "good" iffy feelings and "bad" ones. If on the other hand the company is a monopoly and no reasonable alternatives are available, then it is de-facto infrastructure and should be more stringently regulated for impartiality, as is the government (and frankly such companies are a problem anyway, and should possibly be adopted by the government when they reach that size). The DMV isn't allowed to turn you away for a swastika tattoo, and neither should the electric company. But a baker? Absolutely.
  - growse 7y ago
    The problem with this seemingly simple philosophy is that it results in minorities being ostracised. "Democratising social norms" turns into "Outlawing anything the majority won't tolerate". Suddenly you have towns where black people can't live, because no-one will do business with them. Sure, "healthy competition" should solve this problem - there's money to be made! But people are not perfectly economically rational. We are tribal creatures of prejudice, predisposed to subconsciously reject and suspect anything or anyone as "different". Laws are often made to protect minorities, because history shows us time and time again that an unchecked majority of people can be real dicks.
    - wolco 7y ago
      How far do you want to go? Should a company be forced to offer products to minorities? Say a comb maker who creates combs for the straight hair market should they be forced to offer hair picks? Not doing so leaves them ostracised.
      - mijamo 7y ago
        In France it is straight illegal to refuse to sell to a customer without a legitimate reason. Whether a reason is legitimate is up to court interpretation but not liking the skin color or sexual orientation would not qualify. A racist tattoo at a shoot range would probably. And it doesn't cause any trouble. B2B is not concerned obviously.
- golergka 7y ago
  I'm completely on supreme court's side in the case of the baker (who are assholes but should have their legal right to be assholes). However, this analogy doesn't work with Facebook or Twitter as they have oligopoly status in terms of access to mass audience: there are hundreds of different bakeries that you can choose from, but there's just a couple of SV companies can very effectively silence you. I still don't know what would be an effective solution to this problem, but giving these giants the same freedom to do whatever as a small business enjoys just feels wrong.
- brandmeyer 7y ago
  > This sounds really good until someone refuses to bake a wedding cake for a couple because they're gay. The supreme court ruled in favor of the baker. You're advocating for a world where that's ok. That's not what the Supreme Court ruled. They ruled that the CO commissioners who decided against the baker in the first place were being blatantly flippant about the baker's religious beliefs. They should have at least considered those beliefs. They explicitly did not rule that the baker's religious beliefs were enough on their own to prevent the sale. https://www.scotusblog.com/2018/06/opinion-analysis-court-rules-narrowly-for-baker-in-same-sex-wedding-cake-case/ https://www.scotusblog.com/2018/06/opinion-analysis-court-ru...
  - eplanit 7y ago
    Suppose the custom cake bakery owner is black, and a customer asks for a cake with a confederate flag design? There's nothing illegal about the confederate flag, so the baker should be compelled to bake it, right? There isn't even a basis for refusal based on religious grounds. I would want the black baker owner to be able to not only refuse to bake the cake, but to also tell the customer to take a hike and never return.
    - joshuamorton 7y ago
      > so the baker should be compelled to bake it, right? There isn't even a basis for refusal based on religious grounds. No. Because "supports the confederacy" isn't a protected class. As far as US law goes, you can generally refuse a service to anyone for any reason, unless that reason is related to a protected class to which the person belongs, unless you have some other exception (almost always religious) for not doing the thing.
      - belorn 7y ago
        As you say protected class is a very US specific, but even there it actually depend on the state as they can and in some places has extended it. Protected class under federal law is one list and protected class under state law is an other. Protected class does also not mean that everyone else if a free target for discrimination, and for international companies there is the European Convention on Human Rights. Refusing service based on politics require the company to do a quite complicated dance around a long list of laws and I doubt any company lawyer would be very happy to give a green light for it.
- megous 7y ago
  Ever read ToC on free services? They have the right to terminate the service at any time for any reason. It doesn't matter if you've connected 100s of services to your free Google login, or keep thousands of mails and contacts in your gmail, or made a great business grabing eyes on youtube so that Google can sell ads on your videos and share a bit of profits with you. For example today we've seen Google terminate a service of distributing an app on AppStore because it disagreed with a developer having a donation link, despite that not being excluded in ToS (or so I heard). And it doesn't really matter, how you company refuses a service. ToS just makes reasons for refusal codified and ToS can change at any time. This is already a world we live in, SV companies practice this daily, and I doubt tech companies want this to change. Moral arbiter is society at any rate. Tech workers are part of society, and their companies can't really make rules like you suggested (no service for gays) at scale without getting a major backlash from the public, or internally. Or if they could, it would indicate a much wider societal acceptance for such rules.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  We also agreed not to discriminate service based on race. It's a similar matter but nobody thinks that was a good idea [to discriminate]. Freedom of association has limits.
- RandomTisk 7y ago
  That's not what happened, the baker offered to sell them any cake he had. The couple also wanted him to write a message on the cake that was against his religious beliefs.
- tacocataco 7y ago
  I never understood why a gay couple wouldn't want to support a gay wedding cake baker.
- sunderw 7y ago
  Nobody here noticed the difference between "refusing to serve a customer" and "not wanting to to business with other unethical businesses". Gitlab could definitely chose with which other business they associate, and that would not mean allowing to target minorities. But every customer-facing business should not be allowed to refuse their service to anyone, because you're right, it would very easily lead to cases like the one you're describing.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
> It seems to me if I had power I wouldn't bother trying to persuade my boss not to do business with certain agencies, I'd just make it illegal and force them to change. Does that seem like a course of action available to gitlab employees? You're thinking in terms of fighting the last war. Companies of today know how to work around things at risk becoming illegal. Today, a more effective strategy to persuade your boss about an issue is to spin it as something outrageous on social media, in hope that news portals will pick it up. This power is very much available to a Gitlab employee.
Gunax 7y ago
> Refusing to serve a customer when you disagree with that customer's goal is pretty far from being a "moral arbiter for society." Keep in mind that anyone is free to use other services (or roll their own) and gitlab can't do anything about that. Neither would it be overreaching for the workers building that product to request a say in how it's used. I think this is the crux of the issue. Anyone is of course free to roll their own GitLab (or facebook, or news channel). But this ignores reality. Facebook control ~90% of social media. There's a very high chance that Facebook could sway every election in America (and lots of other countries also) if they truly wanted to. I think we are entering a new era. Just as it required a paradigm shift to outlaw anti-competitive practices, I think we need to re-consider what rights these platforms have around speech.
- wolco 7y ago
  I didn't realize facebooi owned 90%. If you exclude twitter/reddit what's left snapchat?
  - hokumguru 7y ago
    Facebook owns Instagram - the 2nd largest social network - as well as Whatsapp which is ginormous in its own right as well.
  - keerthiko 7y ago
    I'd guess mostly WeChat/Alibaba/TikTok, and a few tiny players that ebb and flow in impact.
  - Gunax 7y ago
    Eh, I guess this is not true. To me, 'social media' always meant websites like MySpace and Orkut where friends connect, and not just 'website where users can communicate in some way' a la Pinterest/Reddit/YouTube. But I realise now that isn't the right definition... still not sure what the word is for the Friendster/MySpace clones--but among those I am pretty sure Facebook is more than 90% of the market (outside of China), possibly more than 99% with Google+ closing.
- akersten 7y ago
LeftHandPath 7y ago
> Refusing to serve a customer when you disagree with that customer's goal is pretty far from being a "moral arbiter for society." Keep in mind that anyone is free to use other services (or roll their own) and gitlab can't do anything about that. Neither would it be overreaching for the workers building that product to request a say in how it's used. I think we're getting to the core of it here. [The law's opinion isn't clear yet, but it appears to lean in this direction.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colorado_Civil_Rights_Commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...) GitLab's decision may not be adequate - but it could help dodge a bullet or two while the law sorts itself out. > "The problem with the whole 'activism' mindset is it doesn't actually target the people who created the problem, it just creates lots of noise – and the problem with noise is facts get lost," Fellows said. The responsible thing to do is to refuse to play ball. If they claimed to be actively vetting content and something slipped through the cracks, it could be more legitimately portrayed as an endorsement than something that occurred with a Laissez-Faire policy in place.
tomnipotent 7y ago
> Refusing to serve a customer when you disagree with that customer's goal is pretty far from being a "moral arbiter for society." The civil rights movement and suffrage prove this is patently untrue. The biggest difference is that gender, religion and ethnicity are easy things to point out, while ideologic belief systems are tricky. Where do you draw the line on what grounds a business can refuse service? Should I be able to refuse service to republicans? How about amputees? I hate the color yellow, so I'm not going to sell to anyone with an outfit on that has that color. I live in Los Angeles, where it's still plenty common to see signs saying "No Shoes, No Shirt, No Service" - which, btw, is not aimed at scantily clad beach goers but targets the poor and homeless population. Same with silly dress codes around baggy pants and hats - all clear examples of bullshit rules intended to single out an "undesirable" customer. Except it's not race/religions/gender so it's cool, right? I'm in the camp that the reasons businesses should have to refuse service should be a whitelist, not a blacklist.
- mytailorisrich 7y ago
  In some countries (e.g. France) it is illegal to refuse to sell to an individual bona fide customer. That's in addition to the anti-discrimination (race, gender, etc) laws we have in Europe. So if you sell cakes for €10 and I show up and hand you €10 you are not legally allowed to refuse to sell me that cake. (heads have rolled for less...) This is pretty effective at preventing discrimination that may otherwise be difficult to prove.
anm89 7y ago
>Refusing to serve a customer when you disagree with that customer's goal is pretty far from being a "moral arbiter for society." This is similar rhetoric to what people would have used to justify segregated restaurants and schools. I'm not saying you sympathize with this but there is a reason why we don't want public businesses turning people away for political speech or other categories. It's not a nice place to end up as a society.

madrox 7y ago

> Refusing to serve a customer when you disagree with that customer's goal is pretty far from being a "moral arbiter for society." This sounds really good until someone refuses to bake a wedding cake for a couple because they're gay. The supreme court ruled in favor of the baker. You're advocating for a world where that's ok. Is that the world you want to live in?

kelnos 7y ago
I think these bakers suck, but I do agree with the Supreme Court. A private business should be allowed to refuse to serve customers for whatever reason they choose. The only exception should be legal monopolies; they shouldn't be allowed to discriminate, because there are otherwise no other options.
- dTal 7y ago
  Hah, ninja'd. We wrote the same comment, except mine's longer.
- dmode 7y ago
  What about refusing to serve black people ? This was literally the premise of civil rights.
  - inlined 7y ago
    And the “but for” argument should have clearly applied here. They would not be denied a cake but for the gender (protected class) of who they were marrying. This was a clear case of judicial reinterpretation to meet an agenda.
    - greglindahl 7y ago
      Doesn't Colorado explicitly ban discrimination against gay people?
  - kelnos 7y ago
    Refusing to serve black people is illegal discrimination. It sucks that sexual orientation isn't a protected class in all states, but the bakers are legally clear here.
  - klyrs 7y ago
    30, if not 3 years ago, this wouldn't even be a question. If somebody argues that the refusal is based on religious grounds, it seems like it would be a relevant test case in US politics.
- radarsat1 7y ago
  > A private business should be allowed to refuse to serve customers for whatever reason they choose. So you're fine with "whites only" signs in shops? Hope that doesn't sound too extreme but while I understand where you're coming from I think it's important to acknowledge where the rhetoric about not distinguishing your customers based on their personal characteristics comes from.
anarchodev 7y ago
I'm not so worried about the supreme court ruling -- businesses don't usually succeed or fail based on the justices ruling that their business model isn't technically illegal. I want to live in a world where the community embraces good things, and actively rejects fascists and bigots whether or not it's legal to do so.
bcrosby95 7y ago
Same sex marriage wasn't even recognized in Colorado at the time. Your ire would be better directed elsewhere, such as the state where the action they wanted to celebrate wasn't legal. Especially a state where you can penalize someone for not baking a cake for an event that isn't legal in the first place. The whole case was a ridiculous hit job.
- greglindahl 7y ago
  People buy wedding cakes for handfastings, renewals of wedding vows, and many other kinds of ceremonies somewhat like a wedding but not legally a wedding, such as the sham weddings that people hold after being married by a justice of the peace at a courthouse. People even buy them to use on stage during theater productions. That's not actually at issue in the Colorado case. "I will not sell you that cake because you're gay" is the issue, not the type of cake.
  - Bendingo 7y ago
    > "I will not sell you that cake because you're gay" is the issue, not the type of cake. This contradicts everything I've read about the case. The baker disagreed with gay marriage, not being gay. To suggest that the baker wouldn't have sold any cake to a gay customer is ridiculous.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
dTal 7y ago
Is this a rhetorical question? Yes, it is the world I want to live in. If the business operates within the context of healthy competition, then while they are free to refuse service, others are equally free to boycott it. This democratizes social norms. I don't want to force gun shops to sell to people they have a bad feeling about (say, because they have a racist tattoo), and I don't want a law that attempts to distinguish between "good" iffy feelings and "bad" ones. If on the other hand the company is a monopoly and no reasonable alternatives are available, then it is de-facto infrastructure and should be more stringently regulated for impartiality, as is the government (and frankly such companies are a problem anyway, and should possibly be adopted by the government when they reach that size). The DMV isn't allowed to turn you away for a swastika tattoo, and neither should the electric company. But a baker? Absolutely.
- growse 7y ago
  The problem with this seemingly simple philosophy is that it results in minorities being ostracised. "Democratising social norms" turns into "Outlawing anything the majority won't tolerate". Suddenly you have towns where black people can't live, because no-one will do business with them. Sure, "healthy competition" should solve this problem - there's money to be made! But people are not perfectly economically rational. We are tribal creatures of prejudice, predisposed to subconsciously reject and suspect anything or anyone as "different". Laws are often made to protect minorities, because history shows us time and time again that an unchecked majority of people can be real dicks.
  - wolco 7y ago
    How far do you want to go? Should a company be forced to offer products to minorities? Say a comb maker who creates combs for the straight hair market should they be forced to offer hair picks? Not doing so leaves them ostracised.
    - mijamo 7y ago
      In France it is straight illegal to refuse to sell to a customer without a legitimate reason. Whether a reason is legitimate is up to court interpretation but not liking the skin color or sexual orientation would not qualify. A racist tattoo at a shoot range would probably. And it doesn't cause any trouble. B2B is not concerned obviously.
golergka 7y ago
I'm completely on supreme court's side in the case of the baker (who are assholes but should have their legal right to be assholes). However, this analogy doesn't work with Facebook or Twitter as they have oligopoly status in terms of access to mass audience: there are hundreds of different bakeries that you can choose from, but there's just a couple of SV companies can very effectively silence you. I still don't know what would be an effective solution to this problem, but giving these giants the same freedom to do whatever as a small business enjoys just feels wrong.
brandmeyer 7y ago
> This sounds really good until someone refuses to bake a wedding cake for a couple because they're gay. The supreme court ruled in favor of the baker. You're advocating for a world where that's ok. That's not what the Supreme Court ruled. They ruled that the CO commissioners who decided against the baker in the first place were being blatantly flippant about the baker's religious beliefs. They should have at least considered those beliefs. They explicitly did not rule that the baker's religious beliefs were enough on their own to prevent the sale. https://www.scotusblog.com/2018/06/opinion-analysis-court-rules-narrowly-for-baker-in-same-sex-wedding-cake-case/ https://www.scotusblog.com/2018/06/opinion-analysis-court-ru...
- eplanit 7y ago
  Suppose the custom cake bakery owner is black, and a customer asks for a cake with a confederate flag design? There's nothing illegal about the confederate flag, so the baker should be compelled to bake it, right? There isn't even a basis for refusal based on religious grounds. I would want the black baker owner to be able to not only refuse to bake the cake, but to also tell the customer to take a hike and never return.
  - joshuamorton 7y ago
    > so the baker should be compelled to bake it, right? There isn't even a basis for refusal based on religious grounds. No. Because "supports the confederacy" isn't a protected class. As far as US law goes, you can generally refuse a service to anyone for any reason, unless that reason is related to a protected class to which the person belongs, unless you have some other exception (almost always religious) for not doing the thing.
    - belorn 7y ago
      As you say protected class is a very US specific, but even there it actually depend on the state as they can and in some places has extended it. Protected class under federal law is one list and protected class under state law is an other. Protected class does also not mean that everyone else if a free target for discrimination, and for international companies there is the European Convention on Human Rights. Refusing service based on politics require the company to do a quite complicated dance around a long list of laws and I doubt any company lawyer would be very happy to give a green light for it.
megous 7y ago
Ever read ToC on free services? They have the right to terminate the service at any time for any reason. It doesn't matter if you've connected 100s of services to your free Google login, or keep thousands of mails and contacts in your gmail, or made a great business grabing eyes on youtube so that Google can sell ads on your videos and share a bit of profits with you. For example today we've seen Google terminate a service of distributing an app on AppStore because it disagreed with a developer having a donation link, despite that not being excluded in ToS (or so I heard). And it doesn't really matter, how you company refuses a service. ToS just makes reasons for refusal codified and ToS can change at any time. This is already a world we live in, SV companies practice this daily, and I doubt tech companies want this to change. Moral arbiter is society at any rate. Tech workers are part of society, and their companies can't really make rules like you suggested (no service for gays) at scale without getting a major backlash from the public, or internally. Or if they could, it would indicate a much wider societal acceptance for such rules.
cameronbrown 7y ago
We also agreed not to discriminate service based on race. It's a similar matter but nobody thinks that was a good idea [to discriminate]. Freedom of association has limits.
RandomTisk 7y ago
That's not what happened, the baker offered to sell them any cake he had. The couple also wanted him to write a message on the cake that was against his religious beliefs.
tacocataco 7y ago
I never understood why a gay couple wouldn't want to support a gay wedding cake baker.
sunderw 7y ago
Nobody here noticed the difference between "refusing to serve a customer" and "not wanting to to business with other unethical businesses". Gitlab could definitely chose with which other business they associate, and that would not mean allowing to target minorities. But every customer-facing business should not be allowed to refuse their service to anyone, because you're right, it would very easily lead to cases like the one you're describing.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

> It seems to me if I had power I wouldn't bother trying to persuade my boss not to do business with certain agencies, I'd just make it illegal and force them to change. Does that seem like a course of action available to gitlab employees? You're thinking in terms of fighting the last war. Companies of today know how to work around things at risk becoming illegal. Today, a more effective strategy to persuade your boss about an issue is to spin it as something outrageous on social media, in hope that news portals will pick it up. This power is very much available to a Gitlab employee.

Gunax 7y ago

> Refusing to serve a customer when you disagree with that customer's goal is pretty far from being a "moral arbiter for society." Keep in mind that anyone is free to use other services (or roll their own) and gitlab can't do anything about that. Neither would it be overreaching for the workers building that product to request a say in how it's used. I think this is the crux of the issue. Anyone is of course free to roll their own GitLab (or facebook, or news channel). But this ignores reality. Facebook control ~90% of social media. There's a very high chance that Facebook could sway every election in America (and lots of other countries also) if they truly wanted to. I think we are entering a new era. Just as it required a paradigm shift to outlaw anti-competitive practices, I think we need to re-consider what rights these platforms have around speech.

wolco 7y ago
I didn't realize facebooi owned 90%. If you exclude twitter/reddit what's left snapchat?
- hokumguru 7y ago
  Facebook owns Instagram - the 2nd largest social network - as well as Whatsapp which is ginormous in its own right as well.
- keerthiko 7y ago
  I'd guess mostly WeChat/Alibaba/TikTok, and a few tiny players that ebb and flow in impact.
- Gunax 7y ago
  Eh, I guess this is not true. To me, 'social media' always meant websites like MySpace and Orkut where friends connect, and not just 'website where users can communicate in some way' a la Pinterest/Reddit/YouTube. But I realise now that isn't the right definition... still not sure what the word is for the Friendster/MySpace clones--but among those I am pretty sure Facebook is more than 90% of the market (outside of China), possibly more than 99% with Google+ closing.
akersten 7y ago

LeftHandPath 7y ago

> Refusing to serve a customer when you disagree with that customer's goal is pretty far from being a "moral arbiter for society." Keep in mind that anyone is free to use other services (or roll their own) and gitlab can't do anything about that. Neither would it be overreaching for the workers building that product to request a say in how it's used. I think we're getting to the core of it here. [The law's opinion isn't clear yet, but it appears to lean in this direction.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colorado_Civil_Rights_Commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...) GitLab's decision may not be adequate - but it could help dodge a bullet or two while the law sorts itself out. > "The problem with the whole 'activism' mindset is it doesn't actually target the people who created the problem, it just creates lots of noise – and the problem with noise is facts get lost," Fellows said. The responsible thing to do is to refuse to play ball. If they claimed to be actively vetting content and something slipped through the cracks, it could be more legitimately portrayed as an endorsement than something that occurred with a Laissez-Faire policy in place.

tomnipotent 7y ago

> Refusing to serve a customer when you disagree with that customer's goal is pretty far from being a "moral arbiter for society." The civil rights movement and suffrage prove this is patently untrue. The biggest difference is that gender, religion and ethnicity are easy things to point out, while ideologic belief systems are tricky. Where do you draw the line on what grounds a business can refuse service? Should I be able to refuse service to republicans? How about amputees? I hate the color yellow, so I'm not going to sell to anyone with an outfit on that has that color. I live in Los Angeles, where it's still plenty common to see signs saying "No Shoes, No Shirt, No Service" - which, btw, is not aimed at scantily clad beach goers but targets the poor and homeless population. Same with silly dress codes around baggy pants and hats - all clear examples of bullshit rules intended to single out an "undesirable" customer. Except it's not race/religions/gender so it's cool, right? I'm in the camp that the reasons businesses should have to refuse service should be a whitelist, not a blacklist.

mytailorisrich 7y ago
In some countries (e.g. France) it is illegal to refuse to sell to an individual bona fide customer. That's in addition to the anti-discrimination (race, gender, etc) laws we have in Europe. So if you sell cakes for €10 and I show up and hand you €10 you are not legally allowed to refuse to sell me that cake. (heads have rolled for less...) This is pretty effective at preventing discrimination that may otherwise be difficult to prove.

anm89 7y ago

>Refusing to serve a customer when you disagree with that customer's goal is pretty far from being a "moral arbiter for society." This is similar rhetoric to what people would have used to justify segregated restaurants and schools. I'm not saying you sympathize with this but there is a reason why we don't want public businesses turning people away for political speech or other categories. It's not a nice place to end up as a society.