
'Everyone Should Have a Moral Code' Says Developer Who Deleted Code Sold to ICE - heshiebee
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mbm3xn/chef-sugar-author-deletes-code-sold-to-ice-immigration-customs-enforcement
======
Verdex
My first thought was: Look, I don't exactly have any love towards ICE, but you
can't delete code that you were paid for.

Then I read the article: Oh. You weren't paid for it. You wrote some code,
hosted it (with the intent that a third party could use it), and then a third
party used your code for a product sold to ICE.

Without saying anything about free software. Companies that repackage and sell
free software really should have the logistics in place such that this event
wouldn't be problematic.

If you host software for free and you don't like what people are doing with
it, then I think you should be able to stop hosting that software.

~~~
SomeOldThrow
> Look, I don't exactly have any love towards ICE, but you can't delete code
> that you were paid for.

You absolutely can. This is the point of a contract.

~~~
SolaceQuantum
Were they paid for this code? I was under the impression they were not (I
think other comments here claimed they were not) please correct me.

~~~
SomeOldThrow
No, this is not relevant to the immediate situation for the reason the parent
commenter indicated. I'm just pointing out that you absolutely can decide to
bail on contracts for moral grounds, you simply have to deal with the
consequences of breaking the contract.

~~~
SolaceQuantum
Oh, I understand. I misread. Thanks for clarifying.

------
rudiv
ITT: post facto justifications for why an open source developer should be
forced to materially contribute to actions they find morally abhorrent. Along
with many meaningless digressions about the validity of the developer's moral
code (ignoring the whole point of a moral code not needing outside
justification).

~~~
sdinsn
> ...for why an open source developer should...

This person is not an open source developer, since they restricted the usage
of their code. They have the right to restrict usage of course, but please
don't taint the idea of open source software.

~~~
aaomidi
Open source software's definition isn't provided to us from the heavens. We've
defined what it means. There's no reason to stick to that one definition we
have - its convenient but please don't assume that the words we have won't
change in meaning in the future.

This is human progression, trial and error, and societal evolution happening
before our eyes. You won't be able to stop this, it's a natural process that
drives society. All you can do is influence this progression.

------
DuskStar
Should we expect contributors to projects used by China in their 'reeducation'
camps to do similar things, or is this just an isolated demand for morality?

~~~
mieseratte
Well, if you're writing an FOSS project that happens to be picked up by the
Chinese you're SOL. It's not as if the PRC has a history of giving a shit
about your IP.

If you're talking about writing bespoke software for them, that's a different
matter than this particular situation.

~~~
jrochkind1
As far as I can tell, what happened here is Chef the company went beyond
writing FOSS that happened to be picked up by ICE, they have some business
relationship with ICE where they get paid. I'm not clear on the nature of it,
from this article.

Seth Vargo, was a former employee... and maybe also kept contributing FOSS
after no longer being an employee? Unclear.

It's not quite either of your situations, but more like the bespoke software
I'd say.

At any rate, if I wrote FOSS that happened to be used by ICE in a significant
way, I'd feel really sad and confused and not sure what to think or what to do
-- I'm not sure what the solution to this situation is, but I wouldn't feel
good about it.

If I worked for CEO Crist/Chef Inc. -- I'd quit. Cause that shit is
disgusting.

If I was Vargo, doing some combination of writing code for an employer on the
job, and maybe also just contributing open source to the project after that,
maybe cause it was a cool/interesting project/community he liked... but then
discovering that Chef Inc. and Barry Crist were _using the code I wrote to
make money by helping ICE with their information systems_....

I'd be fucking mad as hell.

I'm not sure anything can be done about it legally in the long term, if the
code was released open source. But I understand the anger and attempt to be as
disruptive as possible. Cause Fuck That Shit.

------
jrochkind1
OMG, I just realized this statement from CEO Crist:

> "My goal is to continue growing Chef as a company that transcends numerous
> U.S. presidential administrations. And to be clear: I also find policies
> such as separating families and detaining children wrong and contrary to the
> best interests of our country,"

Is basically a paraphrase of the psychopathic CEO's statement in the movie
_Sorry to Bother You_. To me, the most genius gut-punchingly funny part of the
movie (which is full of genius laugh out loud and cringe-inducing parts).

"See? It's all just a big misunderstanding."

"This ain't no fucking misunderstanding, man. So, you making half-human half-
horse fucking things so you can make more money?"

"Yeah, basically. I just didn't want you to think I was crazy. That I was
doing this for no reason. Because this isn't irrational."

"Oh. Cool. Alright. Cool. No, I understand. I just, I just got to leave now,
man. So, please get the fuck out of my way."

------
peterkelly
This is what happens when you rely on a mutable package repository.

------
wbronitsky
There are so many comments attacking OP for the straw man that he dislikes ICE
because they enforce immigration law. I highly doubt that is why OP dislikes
ICE. Instead, it is much more likely that he dislikes the tactics used by ICE,
such as separating families, and locking people in "ice boxes".

The comments attacking the straw man are seemingly only written to satisfy an
attack against an other, which here seems to be the other that "supports
illegal immigration", and I don't believe these attacks further the
conversation. Nowhere do we have evidence that OP or anyone defending him is
in favor of fully open borders, an accusation thrown around more than once in
these comments.

Regardless of the "why", the more interesting discussion is the "should", as
in "should people be allowed to rescind their open source work for any
reason". Otherwise, we are just wading back into a political discussion where
people are not interested in listening, only fighting.

~~~
DuskStar
> which here seems to be the other that "supports illegal immigration", and I
> don't believe these attacks further the conversation. Nowhere do we have
> evidence that OP or anyone defending him is in favor of fully open borders,
> an accusation thrown around more than once in these comments.

Please, tell me how saying "you can't arrest people who cross the border
illegally" is different from supporting open borders. (Since ICE is _legally
required_ to separate children from 'parents' when arresting them, just like
_every other law enforcement agency_ , "don't separate families" is equivalent
to "don't arrest anyone crossing the border with someone who says they're a
child")

EDIT:

To be clear, my argument is that the thing you called a strawman ("Nowhere do
we have evidence that OP or anyone defending him is in favor of fully open
borders") is equivalent to a belief you suggested to be much more likely
("Instead, it is much more likely that he dislikes the tactics used by ICE,
such as separating families"). The argument is as follows:

"ICE should not separate families" is equivalent to "ICE should not arrest
families", as ICE is required by law to separate families after arrest.

"ICE should not arrest families" is equivalent to "ICE should not arrest
people crossing the border", as any competent border-hopping group will either
have a child with them or someone who says they're a child. (Yes, they might
not be related - _that 's what separating families was partially intended to
find out_)

"ICE should not arrest people crossing the border" is equivalent to "ICE
should not enforce borders" is (IMO) equivalent to "Open borders should be a
thing".

~~~
wbronitsky
Who said "you can't arrest people who cross the border illegally"? I will not
discuss this with you while you continue to whip out Straw Man arguments, nor
will I engage with your aggressive manner.

~~~
prepend
Not OP but what confuses me that I don’t know how it’s possible to arrest
families without separating them. In a hypothetical situation where a family
of four (mom, dad and two kids) cross illegally and ICE catches them. They are
arrested.

What is the desired outcome? The options I can think of are: 1) Let them go 2)
Don’t arrest them at all 3) Arrest one parent, let the other parent free in
the US with kids 4) arrest both parents, set the kids free alone 5) arrest
both parents, let kids stay with citizens 6) arrest both parents, let kids
stay with non-citizens 7) arrest all four, keep kids in jail 8) arrest
parents, detain kids in non-prison weird foster care thing

All of these seem to suck for me and make me confused.

Are there other options that I’m missing? I’m against separating families and
putting kids in cages and want to solve it. What are the options that we can
do?

~~~
jadell
Until relatively recent history, "let them go" with an order to appear in
court at a later date was the SOP for anyone without a criminal history. I'm
not sure what the official name for this policy was, but political operatives
sometimes use the pejorative "catch and release" to describe it.

Crossing the border illegally is a misdemeanor. Unless we start separating and
detaining families indefinitely for speeding and public intoxication, we
should probably stop doing it for crossing illegally.

Otherwise, we should change the laws regarding illegal crossing to make the
procedures and penalties more explicit. As it stands now, locking up non-
violent offenders for illegal crossing is a totally arbitrary policy dictated
by the whichever administration is in power. There's nothing in the laws that
say families have to be detained (and thus separated.)

~~~
DuskStar
The problem with comparing "catch and release" with letting someone out on
bail/with a citation for public intoxication is that for the latter, we have a
positive identification for the person in question, we know where they live,
and generally they have a lot to lose from failing to show.

This isn't really the case for people crossing the border illegally. Almost by
definition they won't have a permanent address or a life to be uprooted from
(or if they do, they're already uprooted from it - that's why they're crossing
the border), and if they're set free they most likely won't have legal ways to
support themselves. (No green card == no legal employment prospects)

I'd love to see historical rates of people showing up for their court hearings
in illegal immigration cases like you describe, though - maybe I'm wrong!

~~~
jadell
And yet, until the early 2000s (I wonder what happened right around then...)
that was exactly our policy.

Even today, +80% of families released show up to their immigration court
hearings after being released[1]. (edit) Here's data going back to 2001
showing +90% appearance rate[2]

The idea that we have to hold them indefinitely (and thus split children apart
from parents) or else they might slip away and get lost in the system is based
on an assumption that the people we're detaining don't want to do the right
thing. The vast majority of them do. The reason they're crossing illegally is
usually because they are fleeing a time-sensitive problem (domestic violence,
gangs, etc.) that they can't wait for our immigration bureaucracy to sort out
and let them in "the right way." Once they're here, they seem very willing to
be in the system if it means getting a chance to stay.

[1]
[https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/562/](https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/562/)
[2] [https://www.humanrightsfirst.org/resource/fact-check-
asylum-...](https://www.humanrightsfirst.org/resource/fact-check-asylum-
seekers-regularly-attend-immigration-court-hearings)

~~~
DuskStar
Thanks for the info!

------
AndrewKemendo
_" I was having trouble sleeping at night knowing that software—code that I
personally authored—was being sold to and used by such a vile organization,"_

I have bad news for almost every open source contributor then.

~~~
happytoexplain
Of course, like anything, this is a problem of degrees. Numbers, severity,
evidence, etc. It's pointless to extend any given decision to its logical
extreme and present that as some kind of evidence on whether or not the
specific decision was justified.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
It's not a logical extreme at all. Chef-Sugar was a tiny library that did a
very niche thing that wasn't even called in an ICE related project. In terms
of degrees, this developer provided effectively zero support to ICE - but
pulled out anyway. By the way, kudos to him, there aren't enough people who
will stand on principle IMO.

That said, playing the FOSS game means that by default you risk supporting
people you don't like, that's kind of the whole point of the "Freedom" part of
it. Free as in speech.

Tons of major FOSS tools and libraries are used around the world by dictators
and henchmen and unsavory people alike. Pick your favorite massive OSS project
that you might have contributed to: Putty, Linux, OpenCV, Go, ROS,
Elasticsearch, tar, Neo4j, MySQL etc.... and you'll have contributed some code
that is used by some murderous regime somewhere.

Do whatever you have to do to make it feel like you didn't support those with
some tiny OSS contribution, but just recognize it's pretty arbitrary and own
that.

------
preston4tw
I wonder if it would be possible to extend open source software licenses and
include morals clauses.

~~~
wolco
Sure you could but then it becomes risky to use as the moral code may be hard
to qualify.

------
jrochkind1
So there is a debate about whether a license should be able to have "field of
endeavor" limits and still be considered open source; how much control open
source authors should (or can) have over it's use.

What is going on here does NOT seem to be simply a case of the government
using open source code.

> "While I understand that many of you and many of our community members would
> prefer we had no business relationship with DHS-ICE, I have made a
> principled decision, with the support of the Chef executive team, to work
> with the institutions of our government, regardless of whether or not we
> personally agree with their various policies," Crist wrote, who added that
> Chef's work with ICE started during the previous administration.

So it seems what happened here is Chef the company went beyond writing FOSS
that happened to be picked up by ICE, they have some business relationship
with ICE where they get paid.

I thought chef was open source, so was confused about what selling the code
would entail, but googling discovered that it was "open core"... until
apparently April of this year when they released all code apache?
[https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/02/chef-goes-100-open-
source/](https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/02/chef-goes-100-open-source/)

Which leaves me a bit more confused.

Vargo was a former employee of Chef the company... who maybe also made open
source contributions to the project after he no longer worked there? Unclear.

But this quote from CEO Crist is just garbage:

> "My goal is to continue growing Chef as a company that transcends numerous
> U.S. presidential administrations. And to be clear: I also find policies
> such as separating families and detaining children wrong and contrary to the
> best interests of our country," he wrote.

And you determined there were no ways of "growing Chef as a company" that
didn't require aiding and profiting from activities you yourself consider
wrong?

Does he really think this is a sentence that makes sense and makes him look
good? I think he simply told us he prioritizes money above his own values,
basically that he is a moral coward unwilling to stand by his convictions.

But yeah, the article doesn't give the open-source-geeky details we developers
interested in open source want. What exactly is the relationship between Chef
Inc and ICE? Of Vargo to Chef Inc? Vargo stopped being a chef employee when,
and.. continued to contribute to chef after that? What is this "revert to a
previous version" going on, to what previous version, a version before Vargo
even had any contributions, or what? Which came first, Chef Inc. or chef as a
community open source project?

------
svd4anything
So he temporarily sabotaged many customers to make a political point about ICE
because he believes they are immoral. I’m not sure two wrongs can make a right
like that.

~~~
commandlinefan
This sort of thing hurts open source, too - when you buy software, the
contract is that they'll continue allowing you to use it as long as the check
clears. Now, with open source, you don't have to pay... but you have to run
your business/government the way each individual developer agrees with?

~~~
rsnor
Not exactly.

Developers ultimately have judgement over which projects they contribute to,
and if they feel that more harm is coming out of their work than good, then
they have every right to cease development.

Open source, compared to other development models, suffers _the least_ from
this problem in that there is no single developer that has jurisdiction over
how the product is used. FOSS projects can always be forked, if need be.

------
sdinsn
I do have a moral code. And under my moral code, I'm happy to provide software
to ICE

~~~
happytoexplain
You're agreeing with the headline, but your tone implies that you're
disagreeing.

~~~
sdinsn
I'm not disagreeing with the headline, I'm disagreeing with the content.

I do have a moral code, and I believe that everyone should. However, this
developer implies that everyone with a moral code should align with his
actions.

------
wolco
Every person does but it may not be the same as the author. My moral code
would allow me to develop anything for anybody anytime.

~~~
viiralvx
Sounds like you don't have a moral code, if that's the case.

~~~
phkahler
Just because it differs from yours doesn't mean theirs doesnt exist or isn't
well defined.

~~~
happytoexplain
Can you elaborate? The parent post is making the argument that the GP's
position is the lack of a code, rather than just a different code. I.e.
there's a reasonable argument to be made that "I don't care what anybody does"
is not a moral code, or else we perhaps risk stretching the definition of
"moral code" to the point of meaninglessness. You're disagreeing, apparently,
but without a lot of detail.

------
CM30
Of course, everyone should have a moral code. And moral codes can differ
substantially, and be used to justify pretty much anything.

Many think selling to ICE is wrong, but many others think it's entirely
moral/justified.

And the same goes for everything else. Almost every political/moral position
you can think of can probably be justified using one moral or ethical code or
another. Are their actions right or wrong according to utillitarianism or
deontology or virtue ethics? Well if you ask ten different people you'll get
ten different answers.

So I'm not sure what to think there.

P.S. The whole 'right side of history' thing is super tiresome to read about,
since the right side isn't necessarily the 'moral' one, but merely the one
with the most cultural mindshare at the time.

~~~
MattRix
Not even sure what you're trying to say here. Of course he's going by his own
personal moral code.

~~~
CM30
Honestly, I don't really know either, and regret that comment already.

Either way, I guess I'm just frustrated by how all these media stories seem to
be about the software engineer annoyed by the likes of ICE/the
military/whoever using their code rather the other way around. Or perhaps the
constant focus on ethics in tech as if said ethics are somehow universal/can
be agreed upon.

