11.06.22
Gemini version available ♊︎Quit GitHub and Tell Companies to Do the Same (GitHub is Microsoft’s Attack on Git, on Free Software, and on Developers)
Video download link | md5sum ddf4b7c4cd99cce57dacfce08283fedf
GitHub Should Cease to Exist
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: Matthew Butterick and the Joseph Saveri Law Firm are suing Microsoft for “software piracy on an unprecedented scale”; the Open Source Initiative (OSI) is meanwhile bagging bribes from both Microsoft and GitHub to protect the “pirate”
THE VIDEO above deals with news about the Microsoft/GitHub/CoPilot lawsuit [1-3], but it is preceded by a discussion about GitHub racism. It’s a subject we covered here many times before, e.g. [1, 2, 3].
The video starts with the story “How GitHub blocked me (and all my libraries)” (relatively early cautionary tale) and then discusses with Shawn told us (in IRC) is “truly fascist behavior by GitHub”.
“OSI is little but an organ of Microsoft now. It shunned its own founders!”We wrote extensively on reasons for avoiding GitHub and deleting everything from there. We made many videos about that too. But this time we focus on the stories below, which relate to the plagiarism machine of ‘Team Mono’.
It’s a damn shame that OSI chose to take Microsoft bribes and instead of combating the plagiarism/GPL violations it now spins matters to protect Microsoft’s name or weaken the case (prosecution). OSI is little but an organ of Microsoft now. It shunned its own founders! █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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On the filing of the Class Action Law Suit over GitHub’s Copilot
Many of you are inquiring about a lawsuit filed yesterday afternoon by two “J Doe” Plaintiffs regarding the serious and ongoing GitHub Copilot problem which we have been working on for the last 18 months. This issue is dire and important, but includes many complex issues that intersect FOSS license compliance with moral questions of software freedom and the future of machine learning in human endeavor. Complex issues need careful, diligent, and community-oriented consideration and response.
The attorneys in this newly filed case — Matthew Butterick and the Joseph Saveri Law Firm — did reach out to us, and we’ve been in discussions with them as to the key issues of copyleft policy and concerns about problematic interpretations of copyleft that are inherent in this type of novel litigation. These attorneys expressed to us that they had Plaintiffs who wanted to move very quickly, and we certainly understand their frustration.
We pointed these attorneys to our Principles of Community-Oriented GPL Enforcement, which we co-drafted with the Free Software Foundation and has been endorsed by the Linux Netfilter Team, and many others. One of those principles is particularly relevant in this situation: Community-oriented enforcement must never prioritize financial gain.
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Class-action lawsuit filed against Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot for software piracy
The lawsuit has been initiated by Matthew Butterick, who is a programmer, author, and lawyer. He is being represented by the Joseph Saveri Law Firm from California. Together, they are claiming that Microsoft is engaging in open-source software piracy by using billions of lines of code written by millions of programmers under various licenses including MIT, GPL, and Apache. The defendants named in the lawsuit are GitHub, Microsoft, and its technology partner OpenAI.
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Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot sued over “software piracy on an unprecedented scale”
GitHub and OpenAI launched Copilot in June 2021, an AI-based product that aims to help software coders by providing or filling in blocks of code using smart suggestions. It charges users $10 per month or $100 a year for its service.
“By training their AI systems on public GitHub repositories (though based on their public statements, possibly much more), we contend that the defendants have violated the legal rights of a vast number of creators who posted code or other work under certain open-source licences on GitHub,” said Butterick.
These licences include a set of 11 popular open source licences that all require attribution of the author’s name and copyright. This includes the MIT licence, the GNU General Public Licence, and the Apache licence.
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