Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), a nonprofit organization that provides many services for open source software projects, announced that it will be leaving GitHub and has invited others to follow in its footsteps.
At the heart of the matter is GitHub Copilot, an AI-powered coding assistant tool recently released by the firm.
Copilot is based on OpenAI Codex and aims to suggest code and features to developers as they write. It is powered by natural language text and source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub. And that's exactly the problem, according to SFC: GitHub used open source code to create a proprietary commercial product.
the great migration
In a blog post (opens in a new tab), two SFC members said that GitHub has positioned itself as a dominant force in FOSS development, creating an interface and social features in Git. This led the developers to create a proprietary service, taking advantage of FOSS.
“We are ending all of our own uses of GitHub and announcing a long-term plan to help FOSS projects migrate off of GitHub,” the duo said.
"While we are not requesting our existing member projects to move at this time, we will no longer accept new member projects that do not have a long-term plan to migrate off of GitHub. We will provide resources to support all of our member projects that choose to migrate, and we will help them as much as possible.
The two are not alone either. As reported by The Register, Matthew Butterick, a designer, programmer, and lawyer, also raised the issue of Copilot's violation of open source licenses.
“Copilot completely severs the connection between its inputs (code under various open source licenses) and its outputs (code algorithmically produced by Copilot),” he wrote. "So after more than 20 years, Microsoft finally produced what it falsely accused of being open source: an intellectual property rights black hole."
Some people have also said that GitHub's terms of service give you the right to use hosted code to improve your own service.
GitHub did not immediately respond to our request for comment.
Through the registry