Give Up GitHub | Software Freedom Conservancy

On Wednesday 29 June 2022, we began calling on all FOSS developers to give up on GitHub. We realize this is not an easy task; GitHub is ubiquitous. Through their effective marketing, GitHub has convinced Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) developers that GitHub is the best (and even the only) place for FOSS development. However, as a proprietary, trade-secret tool, GitHub itself is the very opposite of FOSS. By contrast, Git was designed specifically to replace a proprietary tool (BitKeeper), and to make FOSS development distributed — using FOSS tools and without a centralized site. GitHub has warped Git — creating add-on features that turn a distributed, egalitarian, and FOSS system into a centralized, proprietary site. And, all those add-on features are controlled by a single, for-profit company. By staying on GitHub, established FOSS communities bring newcomers to this proprietary platform — expanding GitHub's reach. and limiting the imaginations of the next generation of FOSS developers. We know that many rely on GitHub every day. Giving up a ubiquitous, gratis service that has useful (albeit proprietary) features is perennially difficult. For software developers, giving up GitHub will be even harder than giving up Facebook! We don't blame anyone who struggles, but hope you will read the reasons and methods below to give up GitHub and join us in seeking better alternatives! Also, please check back to this page regularly, as we'll continue to update it throughout 2022 and beyond! 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