The very suggestion that GitHub getting "political" supported by a single issue thread caused them to lose $66 million dollars is so laughable as to barely warrant confrontation.
GitHub is a corporation. The Opal open source project is not. The maintainers in that thread who side against the "SJWs" still readily acknowledge that corporations have different obligations to political correctness than open source projects do. Lest we forget that even if you disagree with this, the maintainers also agree that somebody's personal beliefs are not relevant to whether their contributions are acceptable. So, why should it matter that they hired Coraline, exactly? Either they have an obligation to be politically correct as a VC-funded startup that needs to ensure its public face is immaculate, or Coraline is a fantastic Ruby developer who is good at building community management tools and her politics are irrelevant.
> the maintainers also agree that somebody's personal beliefs are not relevant to whether their contributions are acceptable. So, why should it matter that they hired Coraline, exactly?
I think you argued the wrong way. The maintainer states it's skill not political views that give merit. If github hired Coraline for her political views, then github stated it's political views not skills that give merit.
> Either they have an obligation to be politically correct as a VC-funded startup that needs to ensure its public face is immaculate
Immaculate? There's no black and white here.
> or Coraline is a fantastic Ruby developer who is good at building community management tools and her politics are irrelevant.
Yes but Coraline will never be satisfied with just being a fantastic ruby developer. It was pretty clear from her comments she cares more (or at least as much) about people than software.
I thought it was accepted wisdom at this point that software is people. Caring about people doesn't strike me as incompatible with caring about software --- indeed, for projects which demand collaboration between individuals (i.e. non-trivial complexity), I'd think it would be essential.
That's not what they meant in the Agile manifesto. They just meant they don't want to get bogged down by process instead of publishing something useful to users.
I won't claim it's solely responsible, I don't even know if it's significant at all. But I did start moving projects over to gitlab and downgraded my account. The idea that you could lose your source code from wrongthought is worrying.
>The idea that you could lose your source code from wrongthought is worrying.
Who is saying this, exactly? The conclusion of that thread was the top maintainer on Opal siding with the originator. If you're worried about him removing you from his projects for your political opinions, don't work with him. This is the argument of the other side in that debate. That this thread happened on GitHub is largely irrelevant. If you're talking about hiring Coraline then you're exhibiting the same kind of intolerance for varying political opinions that people are chiding the "SJWs" for in that thread.
Bluntly: I simply don't understand why you think a controversial issue thread reflects at all on how GitHub will function as a product. It's like switching toaster brands because the toaster company hired a proponent of the Atkins diet.
Github does have a record of censoring speech it doesn't like (but which is not illegal). This includes removing github pages and kicking some obnoxious users off their platform while hiring other obnoxious users depending on the politics of those users.
The parent's point is not that they want a source code platform to agree with them in all political issues. They simply don't want a platform that kicks people off for political reasons. I agree with this. Perhaps an analogy will help you understand:
I don't know or care what the political leanings of my local water and utilities companies are. But I will never willingly be a customer of a water company that occasionally shuts off the tap based on a few tweets they disagree with.
With more bullshit like the diversity hiring spree theyre going on. But the internal politics doesn't worry me as much of the fact that they hired a professional bully that can influence who is allowed to use GitHub.
So you disagree with their internal politics? So what? As meh said in the Opal thread, you can absolutely use a tool made by people whose politics you disagree with.
Why are you assuming that GitHub will discriminate against you for your politics? I fully support your choice and in fact I think it's justified, but if you really didn't care about politics, you would keep using GitHub until they kick you off of it for thoughtcrime, as @meh would have the "SJWs" doing in that thread. It honestly just seems that you want a platform whose politics you agree with, and don't want to use a platform whose politics you disagree with.
That is totally fine and valid and is a thing everyone has the right to do. Nonetheless, it's still a politics. Politics is unavoidable, it is a consequence of being able to think and disagree. You can dislike the internal politics, but to do so you have to hold contradictory views yourself. That is the essence of disagreement, and cloaking it in anti-politics does nothing to change that.
> but if you really didn't care about politics, you would keep using GitHub until they kick you off of it for thoughtcrime
I do care about politics, but it is irrelevant to my projects. The time to care about losing access to your source code is before you lose access to it (like backups). Github has shown that there is a signifact risk to hosting my code there so I'm moving off it.
> It honestly just seems that you want a platform whose politics you agree with, and don't want to use a platform whose politics you disagree with.
No, it want a platform that doesn't get involved with politics. Just like I don't care about the politics of any other service I use, as long as it doesn't interfere with my using it.
> Nonetheless, it's still a politics. Politics is unavoidable, it is a consequence of being able to think and disagree.
So you'd be happy to shop somewhere that doesn't allow gay people?
On the other hand do you have any insight they are not losing a large sum of this money because paying customers are leaving for platforms that are not politicised?
Any platform can and will be "politicized." Mediums that allow unbridled communication between humans are always political to a varying degree. "Politics" is really just a word for structured disagreement, it happens and is happening everywhere.
And just to be clear, "prove they're not leaving" is not a great argument. I mean I guess they might be? But $66m dollars is a lot of money. They'd have to lose over a million paying customers to lose that much from people switching away. This is a simple calculation that returns a boolean, there are either a significant number of paying customers leaving such that it impacts on the scale of millions of dollars (and we're talking about a product that is $7/month for individuals here, that's a lot of $7 subs) or there aren't.
What do you think the ballpark is for paying customers irritated enough by that thread's existence that they leave the service altogether? I honestly don't know, I wouldn't know where to begin quantifying.
Yes, I read the thread thrice still didn't understand how that makes github political, especially when the company makes $ on enterprise customers. Is the opal project managed by Github?
Again, do you have evidence that this is actually happening? All I see is a lot of hay made over an issue that the project itself resolved (as well it should have been) from which point it launches into conspiracy theories about what's going to happen now that Coraline is in their employ. She was hired in February, a good 10 months ago. Has anything else happened as you suggest it would to cause concern in this vein since then, or is this all just speculation?
It's not an isolated incident, there was also the code of conduct that makes it clear where GitHub is heading, and that is getting coding mixed up with politics.
I never said she was responsible for it, but the same line of thinking behind that is what allowed a professional bully to get hired in the first place.
Professional bully? She's a Ruby developer, and a damned good one at that by all accounts. Even if you choose to categorize her as a "bully," it's very evident that "bullying" is a hobby of hers and not related to how well she does her job (programming). If her contributions to community management software are valuable, what does it matter her politics?
I reiterate that if you are looking for a place to host your code where a) nobody has political opinions or b) everybody agrees with you about everything, you will never find it.
You may be the only person in the whole world without any political opinions whatsoever. I realize that's difficult and I applaud your intellectual independence.
> If her contributions to community management software are valuable, what does it matter her politics?
Because she has chased away other good developers by bullying them and is now in a position of authority.
> I reiterate that if you are looking for a place to host your code where a) nobody has political opinions or b) everybody agrees with you about everything, you will never find it.
What? We had exactly that for decades, code hosts that were completely neutral on politics. I don't care if people disagree with me, as long as it has nothing to do with the projects. In fact, it's what made the open source world special, no one gave a fuck who you were as long as you produced good code. Now it's been invaded by people that think meritocracy is a bad idea.
When you argue for the "absence of politics", you're actually arguing for the "default politics we've had for generations", which is heteronormative, euro-centric, etc. The "absence of politics" leads to widespread usage of anti-LGBT, anti-women, and anti-minority slurs and policies that disadvantage those groups by not recognizing their institutional disadvantage.
Without getting into details, I completely disagree. Being apolitical is not supporting "default politics". I support LGBT rights and equality for all, but this is the sort of BS that is making me and many others switch political allegiances.
But you're not apolitical. You're calling a transgender Ruby programmer a bully for asking if a maintainer on a project's harmful opinions about trans people reflected that project's opinions about trans people, and the reply was that their shitty opinions were comparable to somebody not liking candy. There's no bullying going on there.
>I support LGBT rights and equality for all, but this is the sort of BS that is making me and many others switch political allegiances.
I appreciate that you can say that, but honestly if stuff as minor as an uncomfortable conversation on GitHub is causing you to switch political allegiance (to whom/what exactly, might I ask?) you might reconsider whose side you were on in the first place.
> Even if you choose to categorize her as a "bully," it's very evident that "bullying" is a hobby of hers and not related to how well she does her job (programming).
If she got her job at github through bullying then she is a professional bully.
> Even if you choose to categorize her as a "bully," it's very evident that "bullying" is a hobby of hers and not related to how well she does her job (programming).
Damnit. I was hoping to cut this off before it continued, but apparently the whiners about this got up-voted to being the highest answers here. The person asking what happened didn't need to know any of this, they just needed to know that there was some inconsequential brouhaha they could ignore.
Apparently the cliche is right: a large portion of programmers are sorta
insular and socially awkward white guys who embrace the concept of "nerd" as a
positive and so are a bit defensive and feel threatened about other views and
groups and people invading their social space. They may have legitimate
concerns here or in similar cases, but the level of energy about it is so
clearly defensive and of a magnitude that's wholly unwarrented.
It's not the nerd that's the problem per se, it's the reflexive rejection of other people's lived experience and the rush to label marginalized people asking not to be marginalized further as bullying that appalls me. You can disagree with the politics but when it comes to name calling the discussion is long over.
Indeed "nerd" isn't the problem, it's just that nerd-pride type of idea comes from two aspects: (A) that there's a history of being marginalized such that people in these circles can feel defensive and (B) there's a definite white-guy cultural thing all tied into the "nerd" identity such that people who identify that way aren't comfortable with the idea that tech could be potentially dominated by the sorts of people who are culturally ill-fit to that identity. The identity politics isn't nonsense.
There's just more going on with the sort of people who would get that up in arms over this stuff than just the surface issues themselves.
