Chef Software Inc. said today it will not renew its contracts with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency following a protest by one of its former employees.

The protest was led by Chef developer Seth Vargo, who decided to take matters into his own hands earlier this month upon hearing the company was planning to renew its contracts with ICE.

Vargo, who opposes ICE’s policy of separating immigrant families at the U.S.’s southern border, responded by deleting a GitHub repository hosting the code for two open source Chef add-ons he had previously written. They’re used by many of Chef’s customers.

“I have a moral and ethical obligation to prevent my source from being used for evil,” Vargo wrote on the GitHub repository page after deleting its code.

Chef Chief Executive Officer Barry Crist said in a September 19 blog post that Vargo’s actions had “impacted production systems for a number of our customers. Our entire team has worked to minimize customer downtime and will continue to do so until we restore services to 100% operation.”

Crist added in the same post that Chef intended to continue working with ICE. “I do not believe that it is appropriate, practical, or within our mission to examine specific government projects with the purpose of selecting which U.S. agencies we should or should not do business,” he wrote.

But now, following what Vice said were further internal protests from Chef employees, Crist has done an about-face. He now says the company will ditch ICE when its contracts expire next year.

In a second blog post Monday, Crist said Chef began working with ICE in 2014 under President Barack Obama’s administration, when its policies were very different.

“For context, we began working with DHS-ICE during the previous administration to modernize their IT practices with agile and DevOps,” Crist wrote. “The overarching goal was to help them modernize their computing infrastructure and create a cooperative community of IT professionals inside the government that could share practices and approaches in a similar way to many open source communities. Policies such as family separation and detention did not yet exist.”

In addition to canceling its contracts with ICE, Chef also vowed to donate an amount equivalent to a full year’s revenue from those deals to charities that help vulnerable people affected by the policy of family separation and detention.

Charles King of Pund-IT Inc. said it was probably smart of Chef to take its employees’ opinions into consideration on this matter, but said Vargo’s decision to delete a critical piece of code from GitHub means it’s unclear what ultimately forced its hand.

“Did the company base it’s decision to drop the ICE contract on a well-meaning belief or policy, or was it because it and its customers were essentially being held hostage by a disgruntled employee?” King said. “It’s a critical question to ask because IT vendors have nurtured and pursued relationships with government agencies for decades, including the DoD. It’s one of the U.S. government’s largest and deepest pocketed agencies, spending billions of dollars annually with IT firms that is not all being directed toward weapons systems or acts of war.”

In any case, what is clear is that Vargo had the power to cause a severe disruption in the operations of numerous Chef customers, and that should be a big concern both for them and the company itself, Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller said.

“It’s very concerning that a single employee’s action, no matter the motivation, can take so many of Chef’s customers down,” Mueller told SiliconANGLE. “It’s a worry because Chef’s customers will need reassurances that it can provide the functionality and uptime they need.”

Chef’s decision is reminiscent of Google LLC’s decision last year to opt out of renewing a contract with the Department of Defense and its artificial intelligence project “Maven.” Just like Chef, Google was originally planning to sign a new contract, only to bow to pressure from thousands of employees that signed a letter saying they opposed it on ethical concerns.

Google later dropped out of the bidding for the DOD’s $10 billion JEDI cloud computing contract, citing similar reasons.

Photo: dkcop/Flickr