Give Up #GitHub: The Time Has Come!

source: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2022/jun/30/give-up-github-launch/

Specifically, we at Software Freedom Conservancy have been actively communicating with #Microsoft and their GitHub subsidiary about our concerns with “Copilot” since they first launched it almost exactly a year ago. Our initial video chat call (in July 2021) with Microsoft and GitHub representatives resulted in several questions which they said they could not answer at that time, but would “answer soon”. After six months of no response, Bradley published his essay, If Software is My #Copilot, Who Programmed My Software? — which raised these questions publicly. Still, GitHub did not answer our #questions.

#opensource #activism #freedom #protest #software #news #coder #development #gpl #decentralisation

Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come!

Those who forget history often inadvertently repeat it. Some of us recall that twenty-one years ago, the most popular code hosting site, a fully Free and Open Source (FOSS) site called SourceForge, proprietarized all their code — never to make it FOSS again. Major FOSS projects slowly left SourceForge since it was now, itself, a proprietary system, and antithetical to FOSS. FOSS communities learned that it was a mistake to allow a for-profit, proprietary software company to become the dominant FOSS collaborative development site. SourceForge slowly collapsed after the DotCom crash, and today, SourceForge is more advertising link-bait than it is code hosting. We learned a valuable lesson that was a bit too easy to forget — especially when corporate involvement manipulates FOSS communities to its own ends. We now must learn the SourceForge lesson again with Microsoft's GitHub.