SFC (Software Freedom Conservancy): Ditch GitHub, now

Compilation｜Xin Xiaoliang, Nuka-Cola

On June 30, the SFC (Software Freedom Protection Association) published an article called “Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come!” on its official blog, which immediately sparked a heated discussion among netizens on Hacker News.

The SFC indicted many of GitHub’s actions in the article, citing multiple counts against GitHub. At the same time, we call on everyone to stop using GitHub and get rid of GitHub’s long-term control.

1 Copilot commercialization – the straw that broke the camel’s back

For a long time, SFC has been considering abandoning GitHub. Last week, GitHub announced that Copilot became a commercially profitable product, which strengthened SFC’s determination to abandon GitHub.

Specifically, since Microsoft acquired GitHub and first launched Copilot a year ago, SFC has been in communication with Microsoft and GitHub about the incident, and SFC has asked several questions without a clear answer. Half a year later, SFC made the issue public and set up an expert committee, hoping that everyone will focus on the ethical impact of AI-assisted software. At the same time, the SFC also organized public discussions, but was ignored when inviting representatives from Microsoft and GitHub to participate in the discussions. Recently, GitHub responded that it would not participate in any public or internal discussions on this issue, citing that “a broad conversation (on the ethics of AI-assisted software) seems unlikely to change your (Software Freedom Defense) position. , so we (GitHub) did not respond to your specific questions.” SFC considers it very disrespectful to wait a year for even such a perfunctory answer.

Copilot’s fee directly angered SFC. “It is unethical to launch a for-profit product that does not respect the opinions of the FOSS community in Copilot’s way,” SFC said.

Here are three questions the SFC asked Microsoft/GitHub.

1. In the public statements of Microsoft and GitHub, what case law did you rely on? GitHub’s CEO at the time said: “1) It is reasonable to train a machine learning system on public data; 2) The output belongs to the operator, whose nature is similar to that of a compiler.

2. Copilot can train models on arbitrary code (and allow users to generate code based on that model) and is not bound by any license terms, so why only use open source software to train Copilot models? For example, why not include Microsoft Windows and Office code in the training code set?

3. Can you provide a list of licenses for the Copilot training set, including the copyright holder or Git repo name? If it can’t be provided, why withhold this information from the community?

Microsoft/GitHub only answered the first question. SFC believes that GitHub’s silence actually reflects that they don’t know whose copyright they have infringed, when and how. In view of this, SFC calls on all FOSS developers to leave GitHub. Although giving up GitHub requires a lot of effort and sacrifice, it is the only way to protest the bad behavior of GitHub and Microsoft.

“The logic behind why it’s so difficult to give up proprietary software in favor of FOSS solutions is that proprietary vendors have designed it,” SFC said. “It’s GitHub that needs FOSS projects to use their proprietary infrastructure, not that we can only Choose GitHub.”

2 Lessons from SourceForge

Older developers may remember SourceForge, the most popular code hosting site more than 20 years ago. Later, SourceForge, which advertised itself as completely free and open source (FOSS), suddenly announced that it would privatize all its code, so the major FOSS projects left one after another, bid farewell to this platform, and SourceForge gradually declined. Although SourceForge is still hosting the code, it has turned into a platform for “cramming a lot of ads on the page” and “baiting users to click and jump inadvertently” for profit.

The hard lessons of SourceForge taught us that it was a mistake to have a for-profit proprietary software company dominating a FOSS collaborative development site, but such a thing is fading out of people’s minds over time.

Over the past decade, GitHub has become the dominant force in FOSS development, building user-friendly interfaces and bringing social interaction capabilities to Git technology, but Git was originally designed to enable distributed software development without a centralized site. With experience with Git and SourceForge, GitHub quickly attracted developers around the world to build FOSS on its platform. GitHub wants to profit from these proprietary products, especially users who want to use GitHub tools to develop in-house proprietary software, but GitHub also provides excellent services for these projects.

But looking at the “routines” that the major tech giants have crafted in their free products, you realize, “If you’re not their customer, you’ll be their product.” The development method of FOSS has become a product of GitHub, and has been proprietary and repackaged with the active or passive support of a large number of developers. As a result, FOSS developers fell into the bad situation of boiling frogs in warm water. As GitHub’s behavior became more and more outrageous, everyone went from anger to forgiveness, to ignorance and even to resignation.

3 Is it imperative to abandon GitHub?

SFC mentioned that there have been alternative solutions on the market, and the degree of completion may not be particularly high, but everyone can participate in it and help improve it. Abandoning GitHub meant a huge sacrifice and time cost, but it was imperative.

SFC said it will work to provide alternatives for projects that are difficult to migrate, and will announce more managed instance options in the coming weeks, as well as revise the GitHub service guidelines.

At the same time, the SFC Committee will also seriously study the general issues of AI-assisted software development tools. Recently, SFC initially found that AI-assisted software development tools can also match the FOSS license in the construction stage. They will continue to support the committee to further explore this idea, looking for new application possibilities. While Microsoft’s GitHub is indeed a pioneer in this area, there are also early reports that Amazon’s CodeWhisperer system (launched last week) is able to provide proper attribution and licensing support for the code suggestion feature.

The portrayal of GitHub’s long-term operating ideas has become the main reason for SFC to abandon GitHub. Through Copilot and its core hosting services, GitHub’s actions have had a bad effect on the industry. The SFC said it doesn’t expect Amazon, Atlassian, GitLab, or any other for-profit host to be an out-of-this-world sage, just that GitHub is far worse from a purely operational perspective. GitHub has repeatedly ignored, dismissed and/or disparaged multiple complaints submitted by the community, so the SFC urges all FOSS developers to leave GitHub as soon as possible and jointly retake the development world that should belong to FOSS.

4 Other Reasons to Ditch GitHub

In addition to Copilot, the SFC lists other behaviors that GitHub is unreasonable.

• In 2020, GitHub signed a for-profit software service contract with ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement), which caused protests from many developers. For nearly two years, there have been calls, including from GitHub employees, for GitHub to cancel the contract. But GitHub’s response was that their parent company, Microsoft, had been selling Microsoft Word to ICE for years with no public complaints.

• GitHub is wholly owned by Microsoft, and executives at the company have attacked copyleft licensing several times over the years. GitHub has long tried to discredit copyleft, including attacking copyleft and GCP in speeches, and its employees have argued on many occasions to convince projects to avoid copyleft.

• GitHub Unlike most of its peers in the FOSS project hosting industry, GitHub doesn’t even offer any option to self-host FOSS projects, their entire codebase is kept secret. Although the SFC is dissatisfied with the parallel business model of GitLab’s “community” and “enterprise” editions, at least the community edition of GitLab offers basic self-hosted functionality and is 100% FOSS. At the same time, there are some non-profit FOSS hosting sites, such as CodeBerg, which openly develop their platform as FOSS.

The text and pictures in this article are from InfoQ Architecture Headlines