As you may remember, GitHub announced its AI programmer, Copilot would be available to everyone with a subscription plan. This move created a huge backlash between GitHub and The Software Freedom Conservancy. The nonprofit organization just declared that it has given up GitHub.
Time to move away from GitHub
The Software Freedom Conservancy published a blog article to show its anger and disappointment over GitHub’s Copilot. The article was written by two members of the SFC, Denver Gingerich, and Bradley M. Kuhn, who wrote at length about the problems they had experienced with GitHub and then explained why it should be replaced for the organization’s member projects.
In the last ten years, GitHub ascended to dominate FOSS development. They built a user interface and added social interaction features to the existing Git technology. It was designed specifically to make software development distributed.
A paid product trained with open-source code
According to SFC’s claim, Copilot uses codes to train itself to help the developers by automatically filling the remaining code. While this could be a great feature for the developers, it is also a paid product that gets its power from the open-source projects on GitHub; this is why SFC got so mad about this feature.
The organization says that they tried to communicate their concerns and GitHub refused to respond to those over the program. On the blog, two members of SFC announced the decision;
« Today, we take a stronger stance. We are ending all our own uses of GitHub, and announcing a long-term plan to assist FOSS projects to migrate away from GitHub. »
While it is not mandated for their existing member projects to move out from GitHub immediately, the Software Freedom Conservancy calls for a move away from GitHub for all new projects. The organization provides resources to support its member projects that wish to migrate. SFC will be announcing more options and a guide for replacing GitHub services in the coming weeks.