The Schism at the Heart of the Open-Source Movement

For the past two years, software engineers and systems administrators from San Jose to Seattle have engaged in the tech industry’s latest rite of passage: reading the news to discover that their employer contributed to something they find unethical. In 2018, Google workers learned of the company’s secret U.S. military contract and state-censorship search project in China from media reports. In February, Microsoft workers signed a letter saying they “did not sign up to develop weapons,” after reports revealed the existence of a $480 million contract between the software giant and the U.S. military. Seven months later, in September, Amazon staff mobilized after finding out how their work on cloud computing supports the oil-and-gas industry.

The next month, the Los Angeles Times reported that Immigrations and Custom Enforcement had renewed a 2016 contract with the . It seemed like history repeating itself: another backlash, another reckoning.