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Ruby Businesses Government United States Technology

Developer Takes Down Ruby Library After He Finds Out ICE Was Using It (zdnet.com) 463

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: A software engineer pulled a personal project down after he found out that one of the companies using it had recently signed a contract with the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The engineer, Seth Vargo, cited the ICE's "inhumane treatment, denial of basic human rights, and detaining children in cages," as the reason for taking down his library. The project was called Chef Sugar, a Ruby library for simplifying work with Chef, a platform for configuration management. Varga developed and open-sourced the library while he worked at Chef, and the library was later integrated into Chef's source code.

Earlier this week, a Twitter user discovered that Chef was selling $95,000-worth of licenses through a government contractor to the ICE. The news didn't go well with Vargo, who, yesterday, September 19, took down the Chef Sugar library from both GitHub and RubyGems, the main Ruby package repository, in a sign of protest. "I have a moral and ethical obligation to prevent my source from being used for evil," Vargo wrote on the now-empty Chef Sugar GitHub repository. Vargo's actions didn't go unnoticed, and in a blog post published later in the day, Chef Software CEO Barry Crist said the incident impacted "production systems for a number of our customers." The Chef team fixed the issue by scouring some of the older Chef Sugar source code and re-uploading it on their own GitHub account.
Following public criticism of the contract, Chef Software CEO Barry Crist responded by saying the company had been a long-time ICE collaborator for years, since the previous administration, long before ICE became the hated agency it is today.

"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 said.

"I want to be clear that this decision is not about contract value - it is about maintaining a consistent and fair business approach in these volatile times. I do not believe that it is appropriate, practical, or within our mission to examine specific government projects with the purpose of selecting which U.S. agencies we should or should not do business," Crist added.
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Developer Takes Down Ruby Library After He Finds Out ICE Was Using It

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  • Fragmentation (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TheZeal0t ( 5132333 ) on Saturday September 21, 2019 @08:09AM (#59219740)
    Is the entirety of free software going to become fragmented by software licenses that specify that this government organization or that political group is not allowed to use it? Licensing is confusing enough already without politics being brought into it.
    • Re:Fragmentation (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Saturday September 21, 2019 @08:12AM (#59219748)

      You can always buy something commercial if you have problem with private developers exercising their legal rights...

      • Re:Fragmentation (Score:5, Insightful)

        by pem ( 1013437 ) on Saturday September 21, 2019 @08:17AM (#59219754)
        True, although the abhorrence of field of use restrictions may very well be the only thing that Stallman and the open source people actually agree on.
      • Re:Fragmentation (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Ostracus ( 1354233 ) on Saturday September 21, 2019 @11:25AM (#59220374) Journal

        Couching the issue under "legal rights" doesn't actually change the problem, nor answer the question. Yes, or no? Are open source users going to have to worry about politics? If so then who's the real winners here? Open source has had enough problems getting and maintaining it's position. Does it need to manufacture new reasons not to be using it?

      • Re:Fragmentation (Score:5, Insightful)

        by 0100010001010011 ( 652467 ) on Saturday September 21, 2019 @12:39PM (#59220640)

        What's worse is that's how this started. A company started selling a commercial option that somehow depended on a public, GitHub repo.

        Chef Software CEO Barry Crist said the incident impacted "production systems for a number of our customers."

        If I'm paying "Chef" to run their product they damn well better be self hosting everything.

    • As if it wasn't fragmented enough already---especially if you consider interoperability in addition to all of the different licenses.

    • Is the entirety of free software going to become fragmented by software licenses that specify that this government organization or that political group is not allowed to use it? Licensing is confusing enough already without politics being brought into it.

      The program in question was licenced under straight Apache, the author just removed the repository. Licences which discriminate against fields of endeavor are afaik generally considered non-free (at least I know that is debians position). So to answer your question: No.

    • specify that this government organization or that political group is not allowed to use it?

      Oh, it's going to get much better! Software licenses will soon specify that only people of this race may use the software or people of that race may not use it.

      This will be problematic for mean, because I don't what race I am. My parents refused to tell me. On forms I always check the box labeled "Other" and then write in "Unknown".

    • by plopez ( 54068 )

      If you don't like it feel free not to use it.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Stick to GPL or BSD stuff if this is an issue, and don't expect the owner to do free work for you.

    • Free Software definition excludes the possibility of restricting what users can use the software for, so this clearly wasn't Free Software.
    • No, because I don't their their even exists any OS software licences that allow that, and it would probably be illegal anyway.

      • You can make any license you want, discrimination is only illegal against protected classes. I've seen licences that restricts use for developing nuclear arms and for only being used for good not evil, they were all considered non-free and either changed or faded to obscurity.

  • Too Bad (Score:2, Insightful)

    by avandesande ( 143899 )
    Too bad he pays taxes which help fund ICE.
    • by plopez ( 54068 )

      too bad he doesn't want to go to prison. An action under coercion absolves that person of responsibility

  • Little Impact (Score:5, Insightful)

    by harlequinn ( 909271 ) on Saturday September 21, 2019 @08:22AM (#59219760)

    It sounds like his archiving had very little effect on the company. A minor inconvenience at most.

    "long before ICE became the hated agency it is today."

    ICE is a government agency that does the same job now as it did in the previous administration. If people malign it now it is because of their political ideology.

    • by plopez ( 54068 )

      ummmm.... no. By directive their procedures have been changed. The job has changed. Previously detention was very short term. Now they are running child concentration camps.

      • Re:Little Impact (Score:5, Informative)

        by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Saturday September 21, 2019 @09:11AM (#59219884) Homepage Journal

        It's also different because we're now doing our best to reject political refugees from countries where we've interfered with the Democratic process by sponsoring or supporting coups, running guns into Mexico, and various assassinations. The CIA has treated Latin America like its private sandbox, and now we don't want to help clean up the mess we helped make.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          You mean how dare we actually follow the UN and International law, where application for asylum must be made in the first country entered [refworld.org] - which would be Mexico. How DARE this Administration follow UN rules and international law! Especially after the previous Administration illegally ran unmarked, untraced guns [wikipedia.org] into Mexico! Let's tar-and-feather Trump for that!
          • Re:Little Impact (Score:4, Interesting)

            by swillden ( 191260 ) <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Saturday September 21, 2019 @10:42AM (#59220234) Journal

            You mean how dare we actually follow the UN and International law, where application for asylum must be made in the first country entered [refworld.org]

            You are misrepresenting the Article 26 provisions, as made clear in the first substantive sentence of the document you linked:

            It should be noted that Member States are not required to apply the concept of first country of asylum

            The UN agreement requires member states to grant asylum under the stated conditions if they are the first country of asylum. It in no way requires them to refuse asylum to asylum seekers for whom they are not the first country.

            On the other hand, US law requires the government to grant asylum to qualifying applicants regardless of whether the US is the first country entered or not. Trump's actions are illegal and will eventually be struck down by the courts. The distinction Trump wants to draw isn't in the law, and adding it to the law would require an act of Congress -- something Trump has been notably awful at making happen, even before his party lost the House.

          • Re:Little Impact (Score:5, Informative)

            by ISayWeOnlyToBePolite ( 721679 ) on Saturday September 21, 2019 @11:32AM (#59220402)

            You mean how dare we actually follow the UN and International law, where application for asylum must be made in the first country entered [refworld.org] - which would be Mexico. How DARE this Administration follow UN rules and international law! Especially after the previous Administration

            If you bothered to read your own links you'd find that the concept of first country of asylum and the APD described is in fact the Asylum Procedures Directive an EU directive, afaik there is no UN resolution nor international law that bear any semblance to your claims. If you continue reading you'll find that it doesn't say what you claim it says and all the different exceptions among the EU countries.

            To give you a quick rundown what it actually says it's that if you have been recognized as a refugee in one country you can not seek asylum in another provided that the first country is deemed safe enough and that they will take you back.

      • Omg! Do they put the kids live in ovens and serve them up in giant pies, too?! I didn't vote for Trump but the whole orange man bad thing is so over wrought and boring af long before now. And oh the excuses and cognitive dissonance required to love Obama or excuse his policies while hating Trump for essentially the same policies is hilarious. My current favorite isn't immigration but all the finance clowns bashing Trump for wanting lower interest rates when they made the rates effectively zero for most
      • by lgw ( 121541 )

        Now they are running child concentration camps.

        Wow, you'll believe literally anything you see on TV, or read in a newspaper!

    • is that there was a perfectly good government agency doing that work beforehand. ICE was created post 9/11 largely as a power grab of sorts.

      Actual lefties paying attention to things like the concentration camps on the boarders are really, really nervous about ICE. It's the kind of organization that could easily transition into a secret police.

      Let me ask you this, if you had to prove, right now, with a gun pointed at you, that you were a citizen, could you? And if the guy pointing that gun at you too
  • by w3woody ( 44457 ) on Saturday September 21, 2019 @08:24AM (#59219768) Homepage

    When I work on projects I try very hard to limit those third party projects that get incorporated into the source kit to those that absolutely must be used, that provide functionality that we cannot easily recreate ourselves.

    One reason for that is simplicity of maintenance: many third party libraries don't really add all that much, or provide a different way to do something the native OS API can also easily provide, or are simply exist for the sake of "The Churn." [cleancoder.com]

    But in light of acts like this, another valid reason is because a third party library provider may simply not like you or what you're doing.

    Sure, this is in protest of a law enforcement agency that has become a popular attack target by the Left. But it does open the doors to other people doing the same thing for other reasons. For example, I did work for a company writing a dating app for iOS and Android. What if one of the libraries I included was provided by a christian conservative who thinks our app abets premarital sex? I used to work for NASA; what if one of the libraries I used was provided by a Flat Earther? I'm now doing work for a company that helps large companies relocate employees--what if one of the libraries I used was provided by a radical environmentalist who believed moving employees half ways across the world was environmentally destructive?

    I think acts like this serve to hold companies hostage for policies the developers of third party libraries may oppose--and that may strongly argue for reducing reliance on those third party libraries wherever possible.

  • by mschaffer ( 97223 ) on Saturday September 21, 2019 @08:25AM (#59219772)

    Well, he certainly showed them as his wildly-shaking fist flailed about.
    I wonder if he will return the tainted money he received while working at Chef while they were under contract with ICE all along?

    • Well he did. I had no idea about Chef and now I think they're bootlickers like Microsoft.
    • What? Money? Return his tainted loot? Lololololol lolololol...... bwhahahahahahaaaa.... So easy to take a fake stand like pulling your silly project offline but people like that guy never suffer any real personal pain for their beliefs. This is all just virtue signaling look-at-me-ism. His English major liberal arts school girlfriend had a huge orgasm when he told her. She then let him touch her boob for the first time as a reward.
  • Let all open source developers know, everybody can use your software, including your enemies, including businesses which will get code for free instead of paying someone.

    If you choose to be nice in a cruel world, don't cry just because the world doesn't become nice all of the sudden.

    • Re: Good (Score:5, Insightful)

      by astrofurter ( 5464356 ) on Saturday September 21, 2019 @09:04AM (#59219866)

      Or add a clause to your Free Software license limiting it to human persons only. Corporations, government agencies, and other fictional legal "persons" will need to pay for a proprietary license - which your are free not to grant.

      • Re: Good (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Way Smarter Than You ( 6157664 ) on Saturday September 21, 2019 @09:26AM (#59219932)
        Then it isn't free software by any definition. Open source, yes. Free, no. Which may not matter to virtue signaling cry babies like this guy getting his 15 seconds but it does to some people who actually belief in the free software movement. Next up: white people may not use my open source because historical oppression, supremacy, etc etc. it's coming.
      • by malkavian ( 9512 )

        Which essentially means nobody will use it. If it's simple, either someone will re-engineer it and release it as open source, unencumbered, or will do so commercially and make a lot of money.

    • If you choose to be nice in a cruel world, don't cry just because the world doesn't become nice all of the sudden.

      I've heard that one before:

      “And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.” -- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

  • by buddyglass ( 925859 ) on Saturday September 21, 2019 @08:43AM (#59219818)
    GitHub should automatically create GitHub-managed forks of high-profile public projects. If the actual project goes poof, interested parties can simply fork the GitHub-managed version to their own account.
    • Or Chef maybe, since their software uses it?

      I don't care, as a salty sysadmin, CPAN has always been a four letter word. You package that external junk with your app or write around it. I don't do "get it from the Internet" in production, and I'll be damned if I start now.

  • I DO believe that it is appropriate, practical, and within your mission to examine specific government projects with the purpose of selecting which U.S. agencies you should or should not do business [with]
  • While I understand that many of you and many of our community members would prefer we had no business relationship with the Nazi Party, 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 said.
    • So you're going to eliminate Chef from your company? Oh wait, you don't use Chef so it's easy to virtue signal about it and scream Nazi. Have you verified that none of your tool vendors or open source code authors also provide services to the eeeeevvvvuuuullll US government? Maybe you should just stop using all open source and write your own. Did you know the Linux kernel is also in use by ICE? Linus supports Nazis!!! We must stop using Linux and write our own fascist-free kernel and in the meantime s
  • by virtig01 ( 414328 ) on Saturday September 21, 2019 @09:14AM (#59219898)

    Better come up with a geofenced license; China is keeping millions [dw.com] in internment camps.

  • Coder makes tool. Coder releases it for public use. Coder gets upset when it's used by people he doesn't like. It's not reflecting positively on the coder's intelligence.
  • by dfenstrate ( 202098 ) <dfenstrateNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Saturday September 21, 2019 @09:44AM (#59220032)

    Well, I know why, but I'll lay this out anyway.
    ICE is a law enforcement agency that enforces the duly enacted laws of the United States of America. We elect people to the House and Senate to create, amend, or cancel laws according to the national interest.
    Standing law in the United States is that we allow X number of immigrants who fit Y standards and may enter in Z fashion.
    The ICE heaters want the rule of law to be replaced by their own fleeting emotion and response to party propaganda. They're literally trying to implement mob rule. They don't respect or love our country. They don't understand, let alone value, civil society, nor the rule of law. They imagine they can take apart our society, traditions and laws because they have feelings, emotions, and they're offended.
    They know not the consequences should they succeed in instituting mob rule... but they will suffer them.
    "But we meant well!!" ....Will be their plaintive cry. If you don't like what ICE is doing, then try to change the law. If the law can't be changed because not enough people agree with you and never will, then you need to accept that as your responsibility in a civil society.

  • by CrankyOldEngineer ( 3853953 ) on Saturday September 21, 2019 @10:10AM (#59220130)

    As noted earlier, every country in the world enforces its borders. If you had ever travelled outside of the US, you would know that ICE policies are harsher under the Trump administration, but far from the worst. Please note the following:

    1. Prior to 2017, asylum applicants were given a Notice to Appear (which they jokingly referred to as "Notice to Disappear") and were rarely seen again. It pains me to be seen to defend him, but Trump is trying to enforce the laws passed by Congress.
    2. Congress can and should change the laws, There is much that the two parties agree on. Why don't they change the law? Could it be that they prefer to have this as a talking point and don't really care about immigrants?
    3. No one is imprisoned in concentration camps. They are free to return to Central America. More than 90% of Central American asylum claims are found to be groundless, so what keeps them in the ICE facilities? Huh?
     

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