Comment by GuB-42
4 days ago
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.
It should be relatively easy to simply not accept money from companies such as these. Accepting this money is a pretty damning moral failure.
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.
Exactly. Any moral compromise can be justified if it’s necessary to fund your startup.
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.
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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.
“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.
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