The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), a non-profit organization dedicated to free and open source software (FOSS), said it has stopped using Microsoft 's GitHub for project hosting and is urging other software developers to do the same.
In a blog post on Thursday, SFC FOSS licensing compliance engineer Denver Gingerich and SFC policy researcher Bradley M. Kuhn said that GitHub has grown in FOSS development over the past decade by building an interface and social capabilities around Git played a leading role. Git is a widely used open source version control software.
By doing so, they claim, the company has convinced free and open source software developers to contribute to the development of proprietary services that leverage free and open source software.
"We are ending all use of GitHub ourselves and announcing a long-term plan to help free and open source software projects move away from GitHub," Gingerich and Kuhn said.
SFC primarily uses its own hosted Git repositories, they say, but the organization does use GitHub to mirror its repo .
SFC has added a "Ditch GitHub" section to its website and is asking free and open source software developers to voluntarily switch to another code hosting service.
Gingerich and Kuhn said: "While we are not currently forcing our existing member projects to migrate, we will no longer accept new member projects that do not have a long-term plan to migrate away from GitHub. We will provide resources , supporting any member projects that choose to migrate and helping them in any way we can."
GitHub claims to have approximately 83 million users and over 200 million repositories, many of which are open source licensed. Cloud hosting services market themselves specifically for open source development.
For SFC, the break with GitHub was triggered by the general availability of GitHub Copilot, an AI coding aid. SFC says GitHub's decision to release for-profit products derived from FOSS code 'overwhelming'
Copilot is based on OpenAI's Codex, which recommends code and features to developers as they work. It's able to do this because it's trained on "natural language text and source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub," GitHub says.
Gingerich and Kuhn believe this is a problem because Microsoft and GitHub have failed to provide answers to questions such as: The copyright implications of training AI systems on public code; Why Copilot embraces free and open source (FOSS) Code training, rather than copyrighted Windows code; and whether the company can identify all software license and copyright holders accompanying the code used in the training data set.
Kuhn has previously written that he was concerned that Copilot's training could pose legal risks, and others have raised similar concerns. Last week, designer, programmer , and attorney Matthew Butterick published a blog post claiming that he agreed with those who believe Copilot is an engine that violates its open source license.
“Copilot completely severed the connection between its input (= code under various open source licenses) and output (= code generated by Copilot algorithmically),” he wrote. "So, more than 20 years later, Microsoft has finally produced what it wrongly accused open source of: a black hole of intellectual property."
Such claims have not been resolved and will likely not be resolved until actual litigation and judgments. Other lawyers pointed out that GitHub's terms of service give it the right to use managed code to improve the service. Of course, Microsoft and GitHub's legal experts believe they've gotten away with license compliance by handing it over to companies that use Copilot to generate code.
"You are responsible for ensuring the security and quality of your code," the Copilot documentation explains."We recommend that you take the same precautions when using code generated by GitHub Copilot as you would when using any code you did not write yourself. These precautions include rigorous testing, IP scanning, and security vulnerability tracking."
Gingerich and Library En believes that GitHub's performance in Copilot and other areas is worse than its peers.
"We do not believe that Amazon, Atlassian, gitLab or any other monetization host are perfect actors," they said. "However, comparing GitHub's behavior relative to that of its peers shows that GitHub's behavior is much worse. GitHub also has a record of ignoring, dismissing, and/or trivializing community complaints on many issues, so we must urge all FOSS Developers leave GitHub as soon as possible.
Microsoft and GitHub did not immediately respond to requests for comment
.
