GitHub

In 2014, an employee went public with her experiences of harassment and discrimination by various co-workers, including the CEO and his wife. The mess spawned a multitude of articles and an internal investigation. The picture painted was that GitHub, a website where people can store and share software code for projects, was a toxic work environment for women.

On Thursday, Microsoft employees published an open letter to management on GitHub asking for the company to drop its contracts with ICE. As Recode reported, Microsoft currently has over $8 million in contracts with ICE, while GitHub recently renewed a contract with the agency worth some $200,000.

Software development platform GitHub defended renewing its contract with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in a company memo amid internal anger at the decision last week, according to the Los Angeles Times.

GitHub CEO Nat Friedman wrote in an internal letter on Tuesday that the company plans to renew a contract worth $200,000 with ICE to license its GitHub Enterprise Server — an amount that Friedman called “not financially material” for the company. GitHub’s contract with ICE was private until Friedman’s note began circulating publicly on Tuesday evening.

...GitHub Chief Executive Nat Friedman announced on [9 October] his company would donate half a million dollars to nonprofits helping communities affected by [US] immigration policies [in an effort to advert]... an internal protest [similar to] other technology firms whose software powers controversial government policies.... [Chief Operating Officer Erica Brescia and the leadership team said] that barring ICE from “access to GitHub could actually hurt the very people we all want to help... We have learned from a number of nonprofits and refugee advocates that one of the greatest challenges facing immigrants is a lack of technology at ICE and related agencies, resulting in lost case files, court date notifications not being delivered, or the wrong people being charged or deported”... Brescia cited the “other important work ICE does, such as stopping child exploitation, human trafficking, money laundering and disrupting terrorist networks.” ... Brescia’s letter was a second response to an Oct. 9 open letter from employees calling on GitHub to cancel its contract with ICE. The employees behind it said continuing to work with ICE would make the San Francisco-based company “complicit in widespread human rights abuses.”... GitHub parent company Microsoft — which has contracts with ICE worth more than $8 million, according to Recode — has also resisted giving in to employee demands to stop working with the agency... Raices, a Texas-based nonprofit that provides legal services to immigrants and refugees... [responded] to Brescia’s claim that nonprofits want ICE to have better technology [said] “We can assure you that’s not the case”...

Microsoft's GitHub next month plans to begin using customer interaction data – "specifically inputs, outputs, code snippets, and associated context" – to train its AI models.

GitHub, the code sharing and collaboration platform that Microsoft is acquiring, today announced that its GitHub Education suite of services is now available for free to any school that wants to use it to teach its students.

For the code-focused website, getting on par with average diversity numbers in tech was an effort.

GitHub is trying to improve its diversity numbers.

GitHub knows it has a diversity problem.