Opensource Chef SW Co $upports Govt Thugs [re: HESSLA License]

[grarpamp]

https://www.zdnet.com/article/developer-takes-down-ruby-library-after-he-finds-out-ice-was-using-it/
https://twitter.com/shanley/status/1173692656192385024
https://www.usaspending.gov/#/award/85073015
https://github.com/sethvargo/chef-sugar

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.