More than five dozen Github contributors on Thursday signed a letter threatening to abandon the website unless Microsoft canceled its Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contract.
Microsoft, which acquired GitHub, the internet’s largest source code repository, for $7.5 billion earlier this month, is one of several tech companies facing heat for its work on behalf of ICE as a result of the Trump administration policy of separating families at the U.S. border.
Members of the GitHub community are now demanding Microsoft end its relationship with ICE or, they say, “we will simply take our projects elsewhere.”
“As members of the open source community and free software movement who embrace values of freedom, liberty, openness, sharing, mutual aid, and general human kindness, we are horrified by and strongly object to the Trump administration’s policies of detainment, denaturalization, deportation, and family separation as carried out by ICE,” the authors wrote.GitHub is all about the open source code that contributors keep there, so an en masse flight to other platforms would essentially destroy the entire value of Microsoft's $7.5 billion purchase, making this no small threat. Microsoft haven't responded yet, but With their own employees applying pressure from inside, too, it's unclear how long Satya Nadella will continue to stick to the corporate line on this one.
Fuller coverage, including the full text of the GitHub contributors' letter, at Gizmodo.