Copilot is a for-profit product — developed and marketed by Microsoft and their GitHub subsidiary — that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to automatically generate code interactively for developers. @@ -61,9 +61,9 @@ the most important ones: issues, the ethical implications of GitHub's choice to use copylefted code in the service - of creating proprietary software are grave.
In 2020, the community discovered that GitHub has a for-profit software services contract with the USA Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Activists, including some GitHub employees, have been @@ -72,18 +72,18 @@ reply has been that their parent company, Microsoft, has sold Microsoft Word for years to ICE without any public complaints. They claim that this somehow justifies even more business with an agency whose policies are problematic. Regardless of your views on ICE and its behavior, GitHub's -ongoing dismissive and disingenuous responses to the activists who raised this important issue show that GitHub puts its profits above concerns from the community.
While GitHub pretends to be pro-FOSS (like SourceForge before them), their entire hosting site is, itself, proprietary and/or trade-secret software. We appreciate that GitHub allows some of its employees to sometimes contribute FOSS to upstream projects, but our community has been burned so many times before by companies that claim to support FOSS, while actively convincing the community to rely on their - proprietary software. We won't let GitHub burn us in this same way!
GitHub differs from most of its peers in the FOSS project hosting industry, as GitHub does not even offer any self-hosting FOSS option. Their entire codebase is secret. For example, while we have our complaints about GitLab's business model of parallel “Community&rdquo: @@ -94,17 +94,17 @@ codebase as FOSS for self-hosting and “dog fooding” by using their own platform to develop its software in public! In addition, non-profit FOSS hosting sites such as CodeBerg also develop their platform - publicly as FOSS.
GitHub has long sought to discredit copyleft generally. Their various CEOs have often spoken loudly and negatively about copyleft, including their founder (and former CEO) devoting his entire OSCON keynote on attacking copyleft and the GPL. There are also examples of GitHub employees filing bug tickets in copylefted projects to cajole them to -change to non-copyleft licenses.
GitHub is wholly owned by Microsoft, a company whose executives have historically repeatedly attacked copyleft licensing.
Add this section to your README.md to share your concerns about GitHub - with your users.
Respectfully and kindly ask, before you contribute to a project on GitHub, if they could provide alternative means to contribute other than - using GitHub.
Explain to your employer the dangers of relying on GitHub's proprietary + vendor lock-in products.
Join the give-up-github mailing list and start threads about your difficulties leaving GitHub. This will help us explore solutions with you and add material to this - page.