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Coders Should Be Activists
Open-source developers could push for climate action or humanitarian causes, but instead, their code has remained a reliable bet for even the most egregious of corporations to use freely
Last year, a former employee of the cloud platform Chef took the entire service offline with the click of a few buttons. In protest of the company’s contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he revoked access to crucial open-source code the company relies on, temporarily crippling the company’s entire platform.
The missing code halted the work of both Chef and its customers, forcing Chef’s CEO to reverse the company’s stance on working with ICE in a matter of hours.
Workers at Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and other companies across the tech industry have begun to protest their employers’ decisions about everything from sexual harassment to climate action by walking out, striking, and writing open letters. But what happened at Chef is the only example I’ve found of developers using open-source code as a protest tool. And that is a huge missed opportunity.
Open-source code has transformed the way almost everything is developed, from banking apps to hardware like your…
