https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/
Why Give Up GitHub?
There are so many reasons to give up on GitHub, but we list here a few of the most important ones:
- Copilot is a for-profit product — developed and marketed by Microsoft and their GitHub subsidiary — that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to automatically generate code interactively for developers. The AI model was trained (according to GitHub's own statements) exclusively with projects that were hosted on GitHub, including many licensed under copyleft licenses. Most of those projects are not in the “public domain”, they are licensed under FOSS licenses. These licenses have requirements including proper author attribution and, in the case of copyleft licenses, they sometimes require that works based on and/or that incorporate the software be licensed under the same copyleft license as the prior work. Microsoft and GitHub have been ignoring these license requirements for more than a year. Their only defense of these actions was a tweet by their former CEO, in which he falsely claims that unsettled law on this topic is actually settled. In addition to the legal issues, the ethical implications of GitHub's choice to use copylefted code in the service of creating proprietary software are grave.
- In 2020, the community discovered that GitHub has a for-profit software services contract with the USA Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Activists, including some GitHub employees, have been calling on GitHub for two years to cancel that contract. GitHub's primary reply has been that their parent company, Microsoft, has sold Microsoft Word for years to ICE without any public complaints. They claim that this somehow justifies even more business with an agency whose policies are problematic. Regardless of your views on ICE and its behavior, GitHub's ongoing dismissive and disingenuous responses to the activists who raised this important issue show that GitHub puts its profits above concerns from the community.
- While GitHub pretends to be pro-FOSS (like SourceForge before them), their entire hosting site is, itself, proprietary and/or trade-secret software. We appreciate that GitHub allows some of its employees to sometimes contribute FOSS to upstream projects, but our community has been burned so many times before by companies that claim to support FOSS, while actively convincing the community to rely on their proprietary software. We won't let GitHub burn us in this same way!
- GitHub differs from most of its peers in the FOSS project hosting industry, as GitHub does not even offer any self-hosting FOSS option. Their entire codebase is secret. For example, while we have our complaints about GitLab's business model of parallel “Community” and “Enterprise” editions, at least GitLab's Community Edition provides basic functionality for self-hosting and is 100% FOSS. Meanwhile, there are non-profit FOSS hosting sites such as CodeBerg, who develop their platform publicly as FOSS.
- GitHub has long sought to discredit copyleft generally. Their various CEOs have often spoken loudly and negatively about copyleft, including their founder (and former CEO) devoting his OSCON keynote on attacking copyleft and the GPL. This trickled down from the top. We've personally observed various GitHub employees over the years arguing in many venues to convince projects to avoid copyleft; we've even seen a GitHub employee do this in a GitHub bug ticket directly.
- GitHub is wholly owned by Microsoft, a company whose executives have historically repeatedly attacked copyleft licensing.