Activists Can Win, But Keep an Eye on the Ball and on the Trophy
GitHub is dying, it was a loss-making trap (or entrapment), not free hosting
Last Thursday I challenged the Council on the issue of bird-feeding and opened a complaint with them. They've not gotten back to me at all, which is actually somewhat of a positive sign and what I all along hoped for. 7 days have passed (not only 5) and it seems like a victory for us, a dead-end situation for them. They lost the argument. "Idiots can be defeated but they never admit it," Richard Stallman once said.
Activism typically wins, but not always. If you don't even try, how will you know? If you don't compete on core principles with the best intentions in mind, how will you endure and win? Doing something to the best of one's ability is essential. It's not mere optimism, it is a necessity (in sports they say "Eye on the Trophy").
I've campaigned against GitHub for many years - to the point of bringing the issue to the UK High Court.
A month ago GitHub basically imploded, though Microsoft moles inside the media (de facto PR operatives) tried to spin it - or kind of twist the whole thing - as a personal story concerning a CEO. A closer look reveals another reality altogether [1, 2].
Earlier today I noticed that Imgflip LLC began charging money for all sorts of features that used to be free; the same is happening to GitHub, which was never free, it was just a ticking time bomb waiting to shut down (or to start charging users a lot of money). They try to sell code or plagiarism thereof as "hey hi"; they basically try to sell access to other people's work and still lose money doing this. They'll never make money out of this because the bubble is imploding and "vibe coding" is fast becoming a laughing stock even among recruiters. The last thing they need is incomprehensible cruft inside their codebases, set aside legal risks. It's costing them money, not saving any money.
Expect more and more cuts in GitHub. It's something Microsoft can hide better when it's concealed inside another unit, a newly-minted and fictional (for hype's sake) umbrella called "CoreAI". █