“Give up GitHub, the time has come”, the Software Freedom Protection Association angrily criticizes!

Sorting | Peng Huizhong Editor-in-Chief | Tu Min

Produced | CSDN (ID: CSDNnews)

In the 14 years since its birth, GitHub has become the most popular code hosting platform for developers with the advantages of complete protocol support and repository hosting in Git format.

However, in recent years, with some changes in GitHub, it has caused dissatisfaction among some organizations in the industry. On June 30, the Software Freedom Protection Association (hereinafter referred to as SFC) published a long article on its official website titled “Give up GitHub, the time has come” , angrily saying: Due to GitHub’s misconduct, the SFC will end its own rights to GitHub. All use and will assist other free software projects in migrating from GitHub . While the SFC will not now mandate that existing members migrate projects, they will no longer accept new member projects that are not intended to be migrated from GitHub.

The SFC’s rejection of GitHub’s services is a strong signal from free software developers to protest their bad behavior to GitHub and Microsoft.

So how exactly did GitHub “annoy” SFC?

Figure source SFC official website

Is GitHub really “good” for free software?

Over the past decade, GitHub has changed the way people program. Not only did it make programming easier, it also changed the way software developers think about programming. It found a big problem that millions of people around the world are struggling with – how to collaborate on code, and designed a much-needed solution for incredible growth and success.

By building a SaaS service around the open source project Git, GitHub provides value to and monetizes the open source ecosystem. Specifically, GitHub’s profits come primarily from those who want to use GitHub tools for in-house proprietary software development.

However, the SFC argues that while GitHub has always advertised itself as providing a plethora of services for so much free software, it is evident from the many free services offered by Big Tech: if you are not a customer of GitHub, you are its product. Tech companies use free software development methods to make GitHub products, and GitHub often takes them private and repackages them without the other party’s knowledge.

FOSS developers have long held a “boiled frog” mentality about GitHub’s behavior. The Software Freedom Defense Association also realizes that their tolerance is part of the problem. When GitHub’s behavior is getting worse and worse, they have been forgiving, ignoring, acquiescing… Until recently, it was finally “after the fall” .

Year-long battle between SFC and GitHub

The event that “detonated” SFC’s big move was GitHub’s refusal to respond to SFC’s questioning of the legality of Copilot (AI automatic programming tool) training on public code for up to a year. And just last week, GitHub completely angered SFC by announcing Copilot as a commercial, profitable product .

The event went through as follows:

• In July 2021, the SFC had a video call with representatives from Microsoft and GitHub, asking several questions that they said could not be answered at the time, but would be “answered soon.”

• After six months of no response, the SFC published its article ” If the software is my co-pilot, who will program my software?” ” (https://ift.tt/mYe9Dgc) article publicly raised these issues, but GitHub still did not respond.

• Three weeks later, the SFC formed an expert committee to discuss “Ethical Issues in the Production of Artificial Intelligence Assisted Software” (https://ift.tt/b32mULX -copilot/), and open discussion at the same time (https://ift.tt/H7Q1SLx). They invited representatives from Microsoft and GitHub to the public discussion, but Microsoft and GitHub ignored the SFC’s invitation.

• In late June 2022, SFC reminded GitHub about the following 2 points: ” 1. We have waited a year for these open questions ; 2. Why did you refuse to join the public discussion on this topic? “

  However, GitHub responded a week later: they would not join any public or private discussions on the issue , as discussions “on the ethics of AI-assisted software” seemed unlikely to change the SFC’s stance, which is why GitHub did not respond to the SFC’s reason.

• On June 22, 2022, not only GitHub, which refused to respond to SFC, but also announced the commercialization of Copilot, the bottom line of SFC was finally broken.

Thus, GitHub’s final position on Copilot is that if the SFC disagrees with GitHub’s views on Copilot-related policy matters, then the SFC is not worthy of a reply from Microsoft or GitHub. GitHub will only bother to reply if the SFC believes it can immediately change its position to GitHub’s policy position. Even so, even the answer Microsoft and GitHub will tell you after a year! During this period, GitHub has been working hard to promote the commercialization of Copilot!

And the three main questions about Copilot that the SFC has been asking Microsoft/GitHub to respond to are:

1. What case law, if any, is relied on in the public statements of Microsoft and GitHub . GitHub’s CEO at the time said: “(1) Training an ML system on public data is fair use (2) The copyright of the output code belongs to the operator, just like a compiler.” In the interest of transparency and respect for the free and open source software community, also Please provide the community with your full legal analysis to justify your claims.

The SFC argues that Microsoft and GitHub’s refusal to answer, saying they still stand by their former CEO’s statement (which was their only statement on the issue), but in fact they have no legal theory to back it up.

2. Why do you guys only choose to train Copilot’s models on free software if, as Microsoft/GitHub says, it is allowed to train models on any code (and allow users to generate code based on that model) without being bound by any license terms ? For example, why aren’t the Microsoft Windows and Office codebases in your training set?

The SFC believes that Microsoft and GitHub’s refusal to answer also hints at the real answer to this question. While GitHub is happy to take advantage of FOSS, they value their intellectual property far more than FOSS and are content to ignore and erode the rights of FOSS users over their own.

3. Can Microsoft/GitHub provide a list of licenses used for Copilot’s training set, including the name of the copyright owner and/or the name of the Git repository? If not, then why not provide this information to the community?

The SFC believes that the reason GitHub refused to answer is that they didn’t copy their models carefully, so they didn’t actually know whose copyright they were infringing, when and how.

To sum up, these problems were not only blocked, but in the end, GitHub’s practice caused SFC to “run away” in anger.

Is Copilot’s legality debatable?

After announcing “running away from home”, SFC’s latest statement also attracted heated comments from more than 400 developers on Hacker News. In response to SFC’s sonorous accusations, GitHub launched a commercialized Copilot. Is its legality true? Up for discussion?

One developer noted that SFC’s question about ” Why aren’t the Microsoft Windows and Office codebases in your training set? ” is his favorite question.

There are also developers who expressed the same concern about the intellectual property rights of the code produced by artificial intelligence: ” It is possible for artificial intelligence to reproduce something very close to the original, and thus be considered an infringement of the original. “

However, another developer said: ” I want to know why you put your code in a public GitHub FOSS repository and don’t want to copy it in any way…I also want to know why people think their code is so special, to As for no one can figure it out on their own. I guess every “opponent” of Copilot is the best developer ever?”

And he points out: “If someone uses your (e.g. MIT-licensed) code in a closed-source commercial software project, that doesn’t free your code to be released, your code is still as open and available as ever, and any No one has lost any freedom.”

The developer’s “yin and yang” statement was also rebutted by a crowd, one of which said: “No one is claiming that they don’t want their code to be copied. People just want derivatives of their code to obey them for themselves. The license chosen by the project. And based on your speech and general tone, I think you’re just biased against free software, just because you don’t understand it, but that doesn’t mean the ideas are mindless. I’m also curious , why should copyright law protect proprietary software, music, games, writing, etc., but not my software, even if it’s not the highest quality work? “

There still seems to be no conclusion about this war under the quarrel of all parties. Did SFC really break with GitHub completely?

The SFC also acknowledged that abandoning GitHub would be a huge sacrifice and inconvenience, and would take a lot of time to complete. But SFC also reminds everyone that GitHub needs FOSS projects to use their proprietary infrastructure, not SFC that needs GitHub’s proprietary infrastructure.

Currently, SFC offers an alternative to GitHub, and while the interface is less familiar to most developers and the site isn’t as popular, SFC says it will help improve those alternatives. SFC has launched a website: GiveUpGitHub.org, which will provide guidance, methods, tools and support for those who wish to leave GitHub.

So, as a FOSS developer on GitHub, would you consider “breaking up” with GitHub?

The text and pictures in this article are from CSDN