[GuB-42]

Boycotting a text editor because the company that makes it accepted funding from another company that has a partner who holds controversial views on a conflict in Gaza where children are killed is going a bit far I think.

In a perfect world, children don't get killed, but with that many levels of indirection, I don't think there is anything in this world that is not linked to some kind of genocide or other terrible things.

[runarberg]

It should be relatively easy to simply not accept money from companies such as these. Accepting this money is a pretty damning moral failure.

[GuB-42]

I don't have a startup, but not accepting $32M doesn't seem particularly easy to me.

I am sure plenty of people here know these things, this is Y Combinator after all, but to me, the general idea in life is that getting money is hard, and stories that make it look easy are scams or extreme outliers.

[foldr]

Exactly. Any moral compromise can be justified if it’s necessary to fund your startup.

[runarberg]

We clearly disagree here, but be that as it may, Zed’s contributors are obviously outraged at this, and I argue that this outrage is justifiable. The amount of money you accept from reprehensible people is usually pretty strongly correlated with the amount of people who’ll look down on you for doing so.

[its-summertime]

> Zed’s contributors are obviously outraged at this

Do you have an example of that? I can't find any contributors that are upset about this aspect of the funding

[runarberg]

It is further upstream: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44965269

But I can re-paste the link here: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/36604

[its-summertime]

Which of those are contributors?

[samdoesnothing]

Microsoft has ties to the Israeli military. Every commentator in that post should be ashamed of using and supporting Github, a product of Microsoft, as they are indirectly supporting the Israeli cause. This is far worse than simply accepting funding from a company who hires an employee with disagreeable views.

[runarberg]

“disagreeable views” is doing some heavy lifting:

> Mr. Maguire’s post was immediately condemned across social media as Islamophobic. More than 1,000 technologists signed an open letter calling for him to be disciplined. Investors, founders and technologists have sent messages to the firm’s partners about Mr. Maguire’s behavior. His critics have continued pressuring Sequoia to deal with what they see as hate speech and other invective, while his supporters have said Mr. Maguire has the right to free speech.

https://archive.is/6VoyD#selection-725.0-729.327

Shaun Maguire is a partner, not just a simple hire, and Sequoia Industries had a chance to distance them selves from him and his views, but opted not to.

This is very different from your average developer using GitHub, most of them have no choice in the matter and were using GitHub long before Microsoft’s involvement in the Gaza Genocide became apparent. Zed’s team should have been fully aware of what kind of people they are partnering with. Like I said, it should have been very easy for them not to do so.

EDIT: Here is a summary of the “disagreeable views” in question: https://genocide.vc/meet-shaun-maguire/

At the end there is a simple request for Sequoia Industries, which Sequoia Industries opted against:

> We call on Sequoia to condemn Shaun’s rhetoric and to immediately terminate his employment.

[zahlman]

In my moral calculus, it is literally not possible for a person to say something that is so bad that it becomes morally worse than actual physical violence. I know from experience that I am not at all alone in this, and I suspect that GP thinks similarly.

Emphasizing the nature of Mr. Maguire's opinion is not really doing anything to change the argument. Emphasizing what other people think about that opinion, even less so.

> Zed’s team should have been fully aware of what kind of people they are partnering with.

In my moral calculus, accepting money from someone who did something wrong, when that money was honestly obtained and has nothing to do with the act, does not make you culpable for anything. And as GP suggests, Microsoft's money appears to have a stronger tie to violence than Maguire's.

[runarberg]

Just to be clear we are talking about genocidal and racist hate speech here (you can see for your self). It it is not some one off things he has said (which to be clear would be bad enough) but something Shaun Maguire has defined his whole online persona around. Speech such as these are an integral part of every genocide, as they seek to dehumanize the victims and justify (or deny) the atrocities against them.

As an aside—despite the popularity of the trolley problem—people don‘t have a rational moral calculus. And moral behavior does not follow a sequential order from best to worse. Whatever your moral calculus be, that has no effect on whether or not the Zed team’s actions were a moral blunder or not... they were.

[samdoesnothing]

It's only a moral blunder if you either decide everyone is guilty of indirect association with "bad" people, or if you selectively chose who is guilty or not based on some third factor (generally ingroup/outgroup). The former doesn't result in making Github threads, and the latter is a kind of behaviour that ironically leads to the sins underpinning this whole issue.

[dlubarov]

Genocidal speech? Where?

The site you linked to just seems to brazenly misrepresent each of Shaun's tweets - e.g. the tweet that "demonized Palestinians" never mentions Palestinians, but does explicitly refer to Hamas twice. Not sure how Shaun could have been any clearer that he was criticizing a specific terrorist group and not an entire racial/ethnic group.

[zahlman]

> Speech such as these are an integral part of every genocide, as they seek to dehumanize the victims and justify (or deny) the atrocities against them.

That does not make such speech genocidal.

It also does not make such speech worse than physical violence.

It also does not make the speech of someone you associate with relevant to your own morality.

[samdoesnothing]

Now that Microsoft's role has become apparent, and which has had a significantly larger impact compared to Sequoia's inaction, why do developers continue to use Github? There are several alternatives which provide equivalent features. Why is this type of inaction not condemned?

Furthermore, if accepting funding in this manner is considered a violation of their CoC, then surely the use of Github is even more of a violation. Why wasn't that brought up earlier instead of not at all?

And finally, ycombinator itself has members of its board who have publicly supported Israel. Why are you still using this site?

Turns out when you try to tar by association, everybody is guilty.