Code removes the open source add-on of Chef to protest the ICE contract

On Sept. 17, Seth Vargo – a former employee of Chief, Software Deployment Automation Company – discovered via a tweet Chief 's licenses had been sold to the Immigration and Customs Control Agency (ICE) under a one – year contract for an amount of 95. $ 500, spent with the approved contractor C & C International Computers & Consultants. As a protest, Vargo decided to "archive" the GitHub repository of two open source Chef add-ons that he had developed in the Ruby programming language. On his GitHub repository page, Vargo wrote: "I have a moral and ethical obligation to prevent my source being used for harm."

This move, according to an email to all hands sent by the CEO, Barry Crist – later published on the company's website – "Impact[ed] production systems for a number of our customers. Our entire team has worked to minimize customer downtime and will continue to do so until services are 100% restored. "

Crist faced an internal reaction from employees during the transaction. The work, he said, began in 2014, long before the current government implemented the child-rearing policies that Mr. Vargo was protesting. "For the context, we started working with DHS-ICE under the previous administration to modernize their IT practices with Agile and DevOps," Crist said.

He continued:

Although I understand that many of you and many members of our community would prefer that we have no business relationship with DHS-ICE, I made a decision in principle, with the support of the DHS-ICE team. leadership, to work with the institutions of our government, whether or not we accept their various policies personally … My goal is to continue the growth of Chief as a transcendent society of many US presidential administrations.

But today, Crist has changed his position. In a new message to staff, he said: "After deep soul-searching and dialogue within Chef, we will not renew our current contracts with ICE and CBP when they expire in the next year. Chief will fulfill all the obligations we have contracted. "

Crist added that the revenues from the current contracts would be "directed to charities that help vulnerable people affected by the policy of separation and detention of the family".

Although Chief is not as well known as Google and Microsoft – other tech companies who have recently seen employees revolt against government contracts – the action is remarkable because it was triggered in part by the link which links him to the open source community around the company platform. .

This is not the first time that an angry developer has a disproportionate impact on a development platform company. In February 2016, a developer named Azer Koçulu extracted his Node.js code from the npm repository to protest against the name of one of his modules being reassigned. He briefly presented hundreds of projects on the Internet for a few hours, while other developers strove to fill in the missing libraries.