The most upvoted thing I've ever written on here by an order of magnitude was a post on yesterday's story saying I applauded the move to ban politics and censorship at gitlab. But sure enough it looks like they've given in to louder angrier voices instead of holding their ground.<p>And that's the most insane part of how this works. They are doing this to appease people but on average people hate these kind of politically correct fear/shame tactics. But I guess it's difficult to measure that and those few people sure sound angry so they buckle not realizing that they are ultimately making a much more unpopular move.
If we've learned anything from Blizzard it is that it is impossible to be an international company and not participate in politics. What would GitLab do if the Chinese government ordered them to take down a repository because it's being used by Hong Kong protestors? If they take it down they are saying that China should get to control Hong Kong. If they leave it up they are saying that Hong Kong should be free of Chinese rule. Either way it is a political statement. Employees are going to have to talk about this and make decisions that reflect their values.
The downside of making so many internal documents public like GitLab does is that policy tweaks like this can spur more external gossip. At most companies I don't think this sort of policy change would have gotten any news coverage.
The vaguest rule to me is the one against making derogatory statements toward "our community". What community is that? Gitlab employees? Developers that upload open source software on Github? Customers that have on-prem gitlab deployments?<p>If a politician (or to invoke Godwin's law a literal Nazi) I don't like uses Gitlab and I say "fuck that guy", do I need to worry about my account being suspended?