A comment I thought was insightful on the NBA subreddit with regard: "You cannot be global and apolitical at the same time".
Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work
911–920 of 1001 posts
Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work
#912I personally think this is awesome. 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. 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 mea…
>I don't wan't some git hosting startup to be the arbiter of morality for society.
Me either! The point is everyone should be the arbiter of morality for society. Abstaining from moral judgements because it's "inefficient" is just alibistic, and leaves society worse as a whole. Tech companies are participating in society just as any other company, there's no reason they should be exempt from ethical considerations.
Technology is not neutral, never was, and pretending it is isn't going to change it - it's just going to pave the way for "inevitable" unethical programs and moral lapses (see: mass surveillance, Amazon->Ring cooperation, ICE cooperation...)
Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work
#913I think this sounds very reasonable for the kind of tool that is being produced. Joel Spolsky has a great article on Big Macs vs Naked Chef https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/01/18/big-macs-vs-the-na... In there, he talks about bespoke development vs mass market products, using McDonald's Big Macs vs a chef. I think this provides a reasonable framework for approaching the present controversy. For example, if McDonal…
Gitlab falls into both - what you are referring to is the cloud offering, the self-serve one.
I doubt anyone (employee or otherwise) would bat an eye if ICE or the U.S. military would open a private repository on Gitlab cloud.
But Gitlab also does enterprise sales (I assume it does enterprise sales at least since they have enterprise software) - which usually means customized integration, bizdev and account management. More often than not organizations like Gitlab approach the companies to sell to them. In the case of government agencies they often can't even approach legally, Gitlab would have to apply into an open bid contract.
Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work
#914Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, that is such a clear analysis that someone should transcribe it. Here's the main part of what Naval says: "If Google, Facebook, and Twitter had been smart about this, they would not have picked sides. They would have said "We're publishers. Whatever goes through our pipes goes through our pipes. If it's illegal, we'll take it down. Give us a court order. Otherwise we don't touch it." It's like the phone company.…
The telephone analogy is terrible. Phone calls are usually between two people, or a small number of people. At the very least, they're bounded to some relatively small number. When you post something on Twitter, unless your account is private, you've broadcasted your speech to anyone in the world who cares to see it. Not moderating any speech at all is a quick way to allow a community to turn into a cesspit of spam a…
> They either have moderation, or they get overrun.
But those boards are moderated by people who are part of the community. Not by the software nor the software host.
Twitter, FB, Google are not part of those communities. If they want to be cesspit of spam and trolling they should be free to do so.
Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work
#915Earlier quoted context omitted.
The phone company analogy doesn't really work, because phone calls are by default private, between exactly two parties, usually just two people. If you look at the tech company equivalent of that, like FB messenger, or Hangouts, or other messaging systems, they behave more similarly to the phone company. It'd be difficult to get in trouble for something you said in a private message. If you want the analogy to make s…
Perhaps if it's presented this way: Group X that we don't like gets its phone service from AT&T. We know they're conducting their hateful business, fundraising, and coordination over AT&T's service. We need to put pressure on AT&T to cut off their service, or we'll assume that AT&T endorses their message.
The analogy still doesn't work. AT&T phone service is not a broadcast platform, and phone service is usually a government-granted monopoly that's highly regulated.
There are very obviously plenty of businesses where we'd expect people to cut off hateful organizations from service. I imagine most party caterers wouldn't want to host the KKK, and nobody would think this unreasonable.
Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work
#916I personally think this is awesome. 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. 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 mea…
"Don't discuss politics at work," is a political statement. It rules particular views in bounds and rules others out. Similarly any business ends up making moral choices. It's unavoidable. To act in the world is to have impact. To consciously act is to intend particular impact. Commerce is inherently social; you choose to serve certain people in certain ways, with particular outcomes intended. These choices are inher…
It is also incredibly luxurious to not engage with politics and the ramifications of our actions on both micro and macro- levels.
Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work
#917Holy moly that's a disgusting piece of very inflammatory propaganda.
Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work
#918Without trying to be inflammatory in any manner, I will say that it takes a certain level of privilege to say one shouldn’t discuss politics at work. If you disagree I’m happy to discuss this viewpoint rather than being downvoted to oblivion. Lots of issues are deemed “political”, but imagine you fall into one of the marginalized groups: — lgbt: Don’t discuss the possibility about being fired for your sexuality becau…
> Without trying to be inflammatory in any manner, ...
I'm not a racist, but ...
Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work
#919I personally think this is awesome. 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. 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 mea…
Companies do not magically become exempt from needing to behave ethically just because they're participants in the economy. If, for example, some government is committing human rights violations, companies have an ethical obligation not to enable it, even if the services they offer aren't under specific legal sanctions. This idea of a company just doing business with no social or ethical responsibility to anyone other than stockholders is an ancap fantasy.
And Gitlab isn't some unconcerned third party passing judgment on morality for the rest of us. We're not talking about your local Dairy Queen franchise gratuitously taking a position on Brexit for no reason. The only power Gitlab has is to withhold their own service. If you're going to argue that their service is so important for society to function that withholding that service constitutes being an "arbiter of morality for society," to the extent that's even true it only increases their responsibility to make sure its products aren't used for evil. A Dairy Queen franchisee doesn't have much power so they don't have much responsibility, but a Google or an IBM has enormous power to make a difference and therefore they have enormous responsibility.
I fundamentally don't agree that corporations should be given carte blanche to use any legal options to maximize profit with no regard to the consequences. The political process and legislation/regulation is probably a better way to address companies behaving unethically, but given that in many cases our political process has failed to put those laws in place we need to hold corporations accountable ourselves.
Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work
#920Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We can’t improve without discussion, and it’s unfortunate that these type of issues are so divisive. Except Cancel Culture is making it that these can't be discussed without complete agreement. Take for example, "Women in Tech", personally I don't see underrepresentation of women in tech as a problem that can be or should be 'solved'. For the better part of 15 years, there has been a massive movement to encourage w…
When people go and talk to women who started out in the tech pipeline but left, many say that the reasons they left are that they felt unwelcome in some way: they were harassed, under-valued, talked over, stalked, underpaid, etc. Too many women choose to leave not because they didn't like the work, but because they didn't like all the bullshit they were implicitly asked to put up with, in order to do the work. If ver…
> Women were heavily involved in the early days of computing and built some of the early foundations of the field, like the first compiler.
Maybe because it was considered mostly a secretarial job and they did not have a lot of other opportunities. Once given the choice to get into more fulfilling careers they took it. It's only because there's money in what is thought as "easy white collar job" that some women try to do it. And it is only because coders cost a lot that there is a push to get more women doing it as a way to lower wages. Even if they don't want to.