This article is based on reporting originally published by the San Francisco Chronicle in December 2019.
Open Source Community Joins GitHub Employees in Demanding ICE Contract Cancellation
In December 2019, software developers representing the open source community published an open letter on GitHub calling for the Microsoft-owned platform to immediately terminate its contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The letter, signed by 44 developers at the time of publication, joined a pressure campaign that GitHub’s own employees had been waging internally since at least September of that year.
The Contract in Question
GitHub had renewed a contract with ICE valued at approximately $200,000. GitHub CEO Nat Friedman acknowledged disagreeing with the immigration enforcement policies ICE carried out under the Trump administration but argued that canceling the contract would not change those policies. The company subsequently pledged $500,000 to nonprofits supporting communities affected by U.S. immigration enforcement — a response that failed to satisfy critics inside and outside the company.
What the Open Letter Said
The open letter framed the dispute as a values conflict rooted in the nature of open source software itself:
“Open source is about inverting power structures and creating access and opportunities for everyone. We, the undersigned, cannot see how to reconcile our ethics with GitHub’s continued support of ICE. Moreover, your lack of transparency around the ethical standards you use for conducting business is also concerning to a community that is focused around doing everything out in the open.”
Notably, the letter stopped short of an outright boycott threat, reflecting the practical difficulty of migrating years of collaborative work away from GitHub’s platform.
Resignations From Inside GitHub
By early December 2019, seven GitHub employees had resigned over the ICE contract since October. Among them was Don Goodman-Wilson, who had worked as a developer advocate at GitHub — a role explicitly focused on persuading developers to adopt the company’s open source services.
In a letter to colleagues explaining his departure, Goodman-Wilson wrote:
“I am deeply concerned about the damage to my own reputation from defending GitHub. Leadership has made clear to me personally that they will not change course.”
Goodman-Wilson had previously described the earlier “Dear GitHub” letter — a 2015 open letter from open source contributors criticizing the platform’s feature neglect — as “quite influential on the way that we approach product design.” That historical precedent informed the strategy of the 2019 letter’s authors.
Borrowing a Proven Tactic: The “Dear GitHub” Precedent
The developers behind the ICE contract letter deliberately echoed the format of the earlier “Dear GitHub” campaign from 2015, in which hundreds of open source contributors publicly demanded new features and bug fixes. According to the 2019 letter, GitHub went “above and beyond” to address those concerns — suggesting the company was historically responsive to organized, public pressure from its open source community.
GitHub’s Platform Lock-In Problem
A central tension throughout the campaign was GitHub’s effective monopoly position in collaborative software development. Several signatories acknowledged that boycotting the platform was difficult in practice.
Tatiana Mac, a product designer and developer who signed the open letter, described the dynamic:
“I think that knowledge that GitHub has that their platform is somewhat of a monopoly within this system, at least in terms of influence, is critical to the fact that they can be somewhat arrogant in the way that they’re responding to this.”
David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), creator of Ruby on Rails — the framework GitHub itself was originally built with — acknowledged the migration challenge while maintaining that the threat of a boycott had to remain credible:
“GitHub has almost innumerable benefits from the fact that they’re seen as the de facto place for open source hosting. But that can absolutely change. I think that it’d be very foolish for them and for their owners to jeopardize that position.”
Developer Workarounds and Protest Actions
Lacking a clean exit option, some developers found indirect ways to apply financial pressure:
- Subscription suspension: Marcos Cáceres, a software engineer at Mozilla and co-chair of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), encouraged paying GitHub users to downgrade to free tiers until the company changed course.
- Sponsorship redirection: Mat Marquis, an independent consultant enrolled in GitHub’s then-experimental Sponsors matching program, announced he would donate the full amount of his matched sponsorships to Beyond Bond & Legal Defense Fund, a Boston organization that helps pay bonds for people held in ICE detention.
- Discouraging new sign-ups: DHH said he would encourage developers starting new projects to wait before joining GitHub, to see how the company responded to the open letter.
Marquis described the situation bluntly:
“For a pittance in tech-money terms, and to appease their parent company’s contract pursuits, GitHub has successfully turned its most impassioned advocates into users that are only stuck here for as long as it takes to find something better.”
GitHub’s Response
Throughout the controversy, GitHub’s public communications were limited. The company repeatedly referred press inquiries to its original internal memo published in October 2019. GitHub COO Erica Brescia was reported by the Los Angeles Times to have argued that restricting ICE’s access to GitHub “could actually hurt the very people we all want to help” — a claim that drew significant criticism from the developer community.
The company did not publicly respond to the open letter or to Goodman-Wilson’s resignation at the time of the original reporting.
Context: Tech Worker Activism in 2019
The GitHub ICE contract dispute was part of a broader pattern of tech worker and community activism in 2019, with employees and contractors at companies including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Salesforce publicly challenging their employers over contracts and products linked to U.S. immigration enforcement and military applications. The GitHub situation was distinctive in that it involved sustained external developer pressure alongside internal employee action, leveraging the open source community’s historical influence over the platform’s product decisions.