They donate 2.5x the licensing fee from ICE to "nonprofit organizations working to support immigrant communities targeted by the current administration".
They also mention that "While ICE does manage immigration law enforcement, ... they are also on the front lines of fighting human trafficking [and] child exploitation" and that "GitHub has no visibility into how this software is being used, other than presumably for software development and version control."
If gh were to revoke their licenses, they would probably (a) just switch to gitlab or something similar, (b) be harming the anti-trafficking and anti-child exploitation efforts just as much as their anti immigration, and (c) not have an incentive to donate all this money to support groups.
I think the "anti-trafficking and anti-child exploitation efforts" stuff is MOSTLY bullshit cover words for other oppressive shit that harms victims and the most vulnerable.
But I personally agree with your thrust. i donate non-trivial amounts of MY money to organizations that support immigrant (including undocumented) communities, as well as my time, as well as participating in campaigns to eg get universities to not accept contracts to train ICE and CBP.
But I'm still not personally inclined to boycott github over relatively small ICE contracts. I assume almost any company is going to have contracts with entities I consider immoral. That's just living in society. You have to pick your battles, and to me this one isn't it, although I respect those who want to make it such. Doing software development without interacting with any companies who have contracts with entities I consider immoral is probably impossible. I personally consider any contract with US DoD equally indefensible morally, and it's just not realistic to avoid business with companies with DoD contracts. But I assume I could find such contracts among github competitors too.
I/my employer currently only use free github though.
Although if I worked for a company, I'd be trying to figure out how to advocate internally to get them to stop -- avoiding working for a company with DoD contracts has been part of my own personal career choices.
I assume Apple, Google, and Amazon definitely have contracts with morally indefensible entities, especially government agencies, including ICE/CBP/DHS -- I still use AWS, and most of y'all do too right? If people boycotting github over ICE contracts are not boycotting AWS, have you thought about why or why not? I'm not assuming you can't have a good reason, just curious if you've thought about it and what it is. i don't totally understand why github has become the posterboy for this, when they seem pretty typical and probably far from worst, when compared with say AWS.
While the company I work for uses github, we don't pay for it; we DO pay for AWS, which also has ICE contracts...
The consideration is whether or not to boycott their software in response. Whether or not Microsoft decides to provide services to ICE is still up to them.
