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I can't help but find this kind of thing horribly undemocratic, The tyranny of a loud few, Take your arguments to the people and contact your representative. Th

I can't help but find this kind of thing horribly undemocratic, The tyranny of a loud few, Take your arguments to the people and contact your representative. This is just using the media to short circuit the democratic process and i think it hurts business and the economy. We live in a system of laws and it has created a lot of certainty for actors within the system.

openasocket 7y ago
Calling for a boycott is undemocratic? It's a pretty standard form of protest, dating back centuries.
- subjectsigma 7y ago
  Interpreting the GP comment charitably: let's say every single GitHub employee opposed ICE (which isn't true, but just pretend) and decided to drop the contract. I have no idea how much this would impact ICE but in our hypothetical scenario let's say a lot. This means an incredibly small percentage of the total population gets to decide whether a legal govt agency functions correctly for the next few months or so, even if the entire rest of the country relies on and supported the agency. I personally believe that GitHub can do whatever they feel is right because they're a private company, but if this were the case, isn't that pretty undemocratic?
  - drewbug01 7y ago
    Your hypothetical situation implies that software produced by GitHub is vital to the operating of this agency, and that there is no other way to do it. If you accept that, your argument looks somewhat compelling. But I don't think that's a claim we should accept - frankly, there are plenty of alternatives to GitHub. Moreover, there are plenty of alternatives to git itself. They are viable and in-use today - git has not always existed and will not always be the tool of choice. And continuing further down the stack... people wrote software even before version control existed as we know it today. You do not need version control to write software (although, I'm sure we both agree it's a good idea). Even if we accept that ICE needs software to do its job - which I don't personally think is true, but neither of us can really claim to know - it's categorically untrue that they need GitHub specifically. They have a myriad of ways they could accomplish their goals without GitHub. But there's another element of your argument we should discuss, and it's one I've heard from CEOs recently - that it's somehow "undemocratic" for a company to deny software to the government, because it privileges the voices of a minority of people. That argument makes very little sense to me. It first conflates "democracy" with a company declining to do business with the government. Democracy is a form of government - the actions of businesses are not and cannot be "undemocratic" - they aren't the government. Setting aside rhetorical annoyances, though - the claim you're making is that a company's actions are depriving the majority electorate of what they voted for, and that they voted for ICE in its current form. I don't think the majority of the country voted on it, and even if we assume they did indirectly via the presidential election ... it's not a contested fact that the current president lost the popular vote. We can't even say a "majority" of people support this without contorting ourselves, or without redefining "majority" to mean "the majority of electoral college votes"... and we get into seriously absurd territory there. Yet we can even dig deeper: if we accept that it's somehow "undemocratic" for a company to deny services to the government - we must also accept the counter-claim that all companies must provide services to the government upon request. They're two sides of the same coin - if you cannot refuse, then you must. That's a scary thing, in my mind - and I do not want to live in a country where a company cannot legally refuse to do business with the government. Current legal theory in the US doesn't support that, and I hope it doesn't change. And finally - even if we accept all of the claims you make (the few explicit ones made, and the many implicit ones that must be made to support the explicit claims): why on earth couldn't the government write the software itself? The federal government employs hundreds of software developers. More than GitHub! If GitHub's software is required, and the agency cannot function without it, and there is no alternative available to the government in the market - what stops them from writing the software themselves?

openasocket 7y ago

Calling for a boycott is undemocratic? It's a pretty standard form of protest, dating back centuries.

subjectsigma 7y ago
Interpreting the GP comment charitably: let's say every single GitHub employee opposed ICE (which isn't true, but just pretend) and decided to drop the contract. I have no idea how much this would impact ICE but in our hypothetical scenario let's say a lot. This means an incredibly small percentage of the total population gets to decide whether a legal govt agency functions correctly for the next few months or so, even if the entire rest of the country relies on and supported the agency. I personally believe that GitHub can do whatever they feel is right because they're a private company, but if this were the case, isn't that pretty undemocratic?
- drewbug01 7y ago
  Your hypothetical situation implies that software produced by GitHub is vital to the operating of this agency, and that there is no other way to do it. If you accept that, your argument looks somewhat compelling. But I don't think that's a claim we should accept - frankly, there are plenty of alternatives to GitHub. Moreover, there are plenty of alternatives to git itself. They are viable and in-use today - git has not always existed and will not always be the tool of choice. And continuing further down the stack... people wrote software even before version control existed as we know it today. You do not need version control to write software (although, I'm sure we both agree it's a good idea). Even if we accept that ICE needs software to do its job - which I don't personally think is true, but neither of us can really claim to know - it's categorically untrue that they need GitHub specifically. They have a myriad of ways they could accomplish their goals without GitHub. But there's another element of your argument we should discuss, and it's one I've heard from CEOs recently - that it's somehow "undemocratic" for a company to deny software to the government, because it privileges the voices of a minority of people. That argument makes very little sense to me. It first conflates "democracy" with a company declining to do business with the government. Democracy is a form of government - the actions of businesses are not and cannot be "undemocratic" - they aren't the government. Setting aside rhetorical annoyances, though - the claim you're making is that a company's actions are depriving the majority electorate of what they voted for, and that they voted for ICE in its current form. I don't think the majority of the country voted on it, and even if we assume they did indirectly via the presidential election ... it's not a contested fact that the current president lost the popular vote. We can't even say a "majority" of people support this without contorting ourselves, or without redefining "majority" to mean "the majority of electoral college votes"... and we get into seriously absurd territory there. Yet we can even dig deeper: if we accept that it's somehow "undemocratic" for a company to deny services to the government - we must also accept the counter-claim that all companies must provide services to the government upon request. They're two sides of the same coin - if you cannot refuse, then you must. That's a scary thing, in my mind - and I do not want to live in a country where a company cannot legally refuse to do business with the government. Current legal theory in the US doesn't support that, and I hope it doesn't change. And finally - even if we accept all of the claims you make (the few explicit ones made, and the many implicit ones that must be made to support the explicit claims): why on earth couldn't the government write the software itself? The federal government employs hundreds of software developers. More than GitHub! If GitHub's software is required, and the agency cannot function without it, and there is no alternative available to the government in the market - what stops them from writing the software themselves?