The decision by GitHub to renew their contract with the Immigration and Customers Enforcement agency is still a significant point amongst developers. Despite several GitHub staff who have quit over the decision, it still looks like the company will not back down.

There is now an open letter and petition from many of the open-source contributors and maintainers who chose to host their projects on GitHub. In it, they are asking GitHub to cancel the contract and commit to a higher standard when it comes to making business decisions that have an ethical impact.

I think it’s excellent that organisations are being called into question about their business dealings. However, what happens if a company doesn’t change its position on an ethical stance.

If GitHub doesn’t cancel the contract, will we see a mass migration of projects away from GitHub? That’s an option. That is until the next source code hosting is called into question about a business deal.