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posted by janrinok on Tuesday July 05 2022, @12:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the Guck-FitHub dept.

From Software Freedom Conservancy

Those who forget history often inadvertently repeat it. Some of us recall that twenty-one years ago, the most popular code hosting site, a fully Free and Open Source (FOSS) site called SourceForge, proprietarized all their code — never to make it FOSS again. Major FOSS projects slowly left SourceForge since it was now, itself, a proprietary system, and antithetical to FOSS. FOSS communities learned that it was a mistake to allow a for-profit, proprietary software company to become the dominant FOSS collaborative development site.

SourceForge slowly collapsed after the DotCom crash, and today, SourceForge is more advertising link-bait than it is code hosting. We learned a valuable lesson that was a bit too easy to forget — especially when corporate involvement manipulates FOSS communities to its own ends. We now must learn the SourceForge lesson again with Microsoft's GitHub.

GitHub has, in the last ten years, risen to dominate FOSS development. They did this by building a user interface and adding social interaction features to the existing Git technology. (For its part, Git was designed specifically to make software development distributed without a centralized site.) In the central irony, GitHub succeeded where SourceForge failed: they have convinced us to promote and even aid in the creation of a proprietary system that exploits FOSS. GitHub profits from those proprietary products (sometimes from customers who use it for problematic activities).

Specifically, GitHub profits primarily from those who wish to use GitHub tools for in-house proprietary software development. Yet, GitHub comes out again and again seeming like a good actor — because they point to their largess in providing services to so many FOSS endeavors. But we've learned from the many gratis offerings in Big Tech: if you aren't the customer, you're the product. The FOSS development methodology is GitHub's product, which they've proprietarized and repackaged with our active (if often unwitting) help.

Microsoft Did It Again, SFC Urges Developers to Quit GitHub

Microsoft Did It Again, SFC Urges Developers to Quit GitHub:

Microsoft's new service for automatically writing AI-based code, Copilot, has sparked outrage in the Open Source community.

"Microsoft loves open source." So much has been put on this slogan recently, only to change the Open Source community's perspective toward the Redmond company.

And while Microsoft was no longer demonized as the worst thing that could happen to the Open Source, certain of the Redmond tech giant's tactics remained regardless of the times.

[...] And now we get to the core of the issue. Copilot is powered by natural language text and openly available source code, including code in GitHub public repositories. And, of course, you must have a paid subscription or a special invitation from Microsoft to access Copilot.

To put it another way. You are a developer who has contributed valuable content to various GitHub projects over the years. Of course, everyone is welcome to use it.

Would you be satisfied if your code was used for profit by a closed-source app without giving you credit? In its classic fashion, this is where Microsoft tramples on moral boundaries.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Tuesday July 05 2022, @03:42PM (7 children)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday July 05 2022, @03:42PM (#1258281) Homepage
    Do you mean:
    - We're supposed to be taking the high road here, and making our licences completely open, not with arbitrarily chosen restrictions that support our personal moral choices.
    or
    - If it's Open, it's Open for anybody who abides by the license, and if we've embedded our personal moral choices into that license, we must take the moral high ground by upholding it, and not letting people not abide by the license.
    ?
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by tangomargarine on Tuesday July 05 2022, @05:37PM (6 children)

    by tangomargarine (667) on Tuesday July 05 2022, @05:37PM (#1258310)

    The former. It's not "taking the high ground" to enforce a contract; it's called doing business.

    --
    "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
    • (Score: 2, Flamebait) by FatPhil on Tuesday July 05 2022, @06:22PM (5 children)

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday July 05 2022, @06:22PM (#1258327) Homepage
      So having moral standards is a bad thing? That's nice.
      --
      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
      • (Score: 1, Troll) by tangomargarine on Tuesday July 05 2022, @06:55PM (4 children)

        by tangomargarine (667) on Tuesday July 05 2022, @06:55PM (#1258333)

        What? I didn't say that, and I don't know what tangent you're going off on here.

        --
        "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
        • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday July 05 2022, @08:40PM (3 children)

          by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday July 05 2022, @08:40PM (#1258367) Homepage
          No, you literally said exactly that - you said that all moral stances must be cast to one side.

          If you don't understand that, consider rereading my posts for comprehension this time.
          --
          Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
          • (Score: 2, Interesting) by tangomargarine on Tuesday July 05 2022, @08:58PM (2 children)

            by tangomargarine (667) on Tuesday July 05 2022, @08:58PM (#1258372)

            Do you mean:
            - We're supposed to be taking the high road here, and making our licenses completely open, not with arbitrarily chosen restrictions that support our personal moral choices.
            or
            - If it's Open, it's Open for anybody who abides by the license, and if we've embedded our personal moral choices into that license, we must take the moral high ground by upholding it, and not letting people not abide by the license.
            ?

            The former. It's not "taking the high ground" to enforce a contract; it's called doing business.

            So having moral standards is a bad thing? That's nice.

            you said that all moral stances must be cast to one side.

            You're trying to pull some reductio ad absurdum BS on me here and I don't appreciate it. In this specific case morals shouldn't get involved with it, yes. I never said "having morals is a bad thing."

            The entire point of Open Source as RMS preaches it, is to make your work available for people to use. Not available to people that you like.

            Or let's compare this to recent news: Do pro-choice people say "all women should have access to abortion...as long as they're the ones I like"? No. Because that would be hypocritical.

            Everybody has morals. It is not necessary to drag politics and morals into any random programming project solely because it is Open Source. If you prefer to deny people the ability to use your source, there are plenty of proprietary licenses that allow you to do just that.

            If you don't understand that, consider rereading my posts for comprehension this time.

            I would propose *you* go back and reread your words, and consider whether you were arguing in good faith, or trying to twist what I was saying so that you can offtopically posture about your morality.

            --
            "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
            • (Score: 5, Informative) by sgleysti on Tuesday July 05 2022, @11:26PM

              by sgleysti (56) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 05 2022, @11:26PM (#1258402)

              I'm going to ignore the other poster you're interacting with (because they sound annoying) and focus narrowly on one issue here.

              The entire point of Open Source as RMS preaches it...

              RMS preaches free software not open source. This is very important to him. See his article Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software [gnu.org]. There's a 3-sentence summary at the top.

              My take on RMS, free software, and copyleft as distinct from open source is that the whole goal is to preserve the ability of the people using the software to use it, modify it, fix it, relink it, redistribute it, etc. without encumbrance for the indefinite future. RMS views this as an incredibly important moral issue and sees proprietary software as evil. I'm not kidding. This is why the GPL and related licenses require anyone who creates and distributes a derivative work based on GPL-licensed software to make their changes available under the same terms. This prevents some proprietary software vendor from taking some free software, modifying it, and denying their users the same freedoms as the users of the original software. The hope of free software ideologues is that their free software projects will be so useful and significant that even proprietary vendors will decide to contribute improvements and grow the free software rather than roll their own. The linux kernel has seen this occur.

              The entire point of Open Source as RMS preaches it, is to make your work available for people to use. Not available to people that you like.

              This is on point if you remove the bit about RMS. This is more of the philosophy behind the BSD licenses [wikipedia.org] and related licenses as well as my personal favorite, the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication [creativecommons.org].

              For the record, I think RMS is a nut, but I find all of this very interesting.

            • (Score: 1, Troll) by FatPhil on Wednesday July 06 2022, @11:51AM

              by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Wednesday July 06 2022, @11:51AM (#1258493) Homepage
              > You're trying to pull some reductio ad absurdum BS on me here and I don't appreciate it.

              I'm sorry you hate logic and its application so much you even feel the need to denegrate it by insulting it. So be it; you have the right to reject logic, and the right to be wrong.
              --
              Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves