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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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Tuesday July 05 2022, @09:30PM (1 child)
A few years back I was looking for something free to host my off-site backups of some random hobby nonsense that I'd been writing and maybe to make public some very obscure niche development stuff I had written, but also because I wanted to "open source" some stuff for the sake of it.
I've worked for a few large companies over the years, and I've had all the corporate training on IP and software patents. You won't be surprised to hear that some household names ran out of ideas decades ago, and to "make money" they hoard IP rather than do proper innovation (R&D) which is expensive and risky. What that means is that they trawl all the engineers' work periodically for "inventions" to patent.
Let me give you an example. A respected colleague of mine, working on a real time embedded system, had written the code to bootstrap the system and start all the tasks in the RTOS. That consisted of iterating through an array of structures and calling OS functions. Each structure contained the name (ASCII string) of the task/thread, a pointer to its main() function, a pointer to its memory pool, its stack size (in bytes), and various other things. The corporate lawyer types thought this was an amazing invention worthy of a patent application...
TL;DR sense prevailed and it didn't happen, however, what I learned was that some things can be patented (and many things are since the patent people are generally ignorant and stupid and corporations have a lot of money to send on lawyers) but they can't patent something that is prior art. That doesn't mean someone has patented it previously. Prior art can mean that it has been published (and not just in the Public Domain) so that means if you write some code and claim copyright on it (as you are legally entitled to do without consulting a lawyer and paying money) and put it out for public consumption, for example under a FOSS license such as the GPL, BSD, Apache, whatever, you have prior art, it's out there, and J. Random Corporation has very little chance of claiming IP rights on it.
What this means is that we should all put as much code out there as possible under FOSS licenses, whether we thing it's any use or not, and the Microsofts and IBMs and Oracles of this world can not come along later and claim to have invented something relatively trivial.
Don't be shy. Put your code out there.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday July 05 2022, @09:32PM
Where I was going with that was that I decided on Gitlab for my stuff. The gitlab code is FOSS (and started as a fork of github) and you can set up your own server too. I did that a couple of times and was using it at work for a project.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].