[nilshauk]

I used to admire GitHub for being a fully bootstrapped company and free to pursue a path in the world they believed in as a company.

Since the Microsoft acquisition it’s becoming painfully obvious how unhealthily centralized the dev world has become, and they seem to strive to become ever more entrenched in the name of maximizing shareholder value.

I only have a small amount of open source projects on GH but I intend to vote with my feet and abandon the platform by self-hosting Gitea. By itself it won’t be a big splash but I’m inspired by posts such as this and I hope to inspire someone else in turn. Of all people we devs should be able to find good ways to decentralize.

[remram]

In this case that might not help you at all. If your project is popular enough, somebody will mirror it on GitHub, where they are free (or believe they are) to incorporate your code in Copilot. Voting with your feet might be helpful long-term but will not protect you from this particular "feature".

[toastal]

It's more than that though. You should vote with your feet in opposition to all Microsoft products involved in this loop, not just GitHub. No GitHub Sponsors. So no VS Code. No NPM. No Azure.

[Karrot_Kream]

What does this have to do with Copilot?

[nilshauk]

Thanks for the question. Well. I put my AGPLv3-licensed code on GitHub to help other developers. I didn’t do this to help GitHub / Microsoft build a closed-source tool to monopolize the (F)OSS market.

It’s interesting how incumbent companies such as Google and GitHub try to capitalize on their user data with machine learning in any way they can to maximize shareholder value.

GH and MS spend a lot of time talking about how important open source is to them. They didn’t exactly prove this by building Copilot to be so oblivious about licensing. Either they took a gamble and hope they’d get away with it or it didn’t occur to them that this would be a problem at all. Either way, I’ve lost faith in GH's ability to act in the best interest of its users and the larger open source community.

It’s a free market and I hope to see more competition in this space: Both from GitHub-alternatives that respect code-licenses and from self-hosting alternatives.