Recently the Software Freedom Conservancy, released through an advertisement that will stop depending on GitHub to host open source projects, thereby This is how you express your disagreement. with project leaders using open source to achieve closed source software solutions.
An example of this is copilot, GitHub's commercial artificial intelligence, which is at the center of this decision, for which Software Freedom Conservancy explains the reasons.
In his statement he shares:
Those who forget history often repeat it without realizing it. Some of us remember that twenty-one years ago, the most popular code hosting site, a completely free and open source (FOSS) site called SourceForge, made all of its code proprietary and never released it to the community again. The main free and open source projects gradually abandoned SourceForge because it was now a proprietary system, contrary to the spirit of openness that characterizes the community. Free software communities learned that it was a mistake to allow a for-profit proprietary software company to become the dominant free collaborative development site. SourceForge slowly collapsed after DotCom's fall, and today, SourceForge is more ad link bait than code hosting. We learned a valuable lesson that was all too easy to forget, especially when companies manipulate Free Software communities for their own ends. Now we must relearn the SourceForge lesson with Microsoft's GitHub.
Over the last ten years, GitHub has come to dominate free software development. It accomplished this by creating a user interface and adding social interaction features to the existing Git technology. (Git, for its part, was designed specifically for software development to be distributed without a centralized site.) In the central irony, GitHub succeeded where SourceForge failed: we were convinced to promote and even help build a proprietary system that takes advantage of free software. GitHub takes advantage of these proprietary products (sometimes from customers using it for problematic activities). Specifically, GitHub primarily benefits those who want to use GitHub's tools to develop proprietary software in-house. However, GitHub emerges again and again as a good player, highlighting its generosity in serving so many FOSS companies. But we've learned from Big Tech's many free offerings: If you're not the customer, you're the product. The Libre development methodology is the product of GitHub, which they have customized and repackaged with our active (albeit often unwitting) help.
Free software developers have been the proverbial frog in boiling water for far too long. GitHub's behavior got progressively worse, and we excused, ignored, or accepted cognitive dissonance. We at Software Freedom Conservancy have been part of the problem ourselves; Until recently, even we had become too comfortable, complacent, and complicit on GitHub.
Leaving GitHub will require work, sacrifice, and can be time-consuming, even for us: At the Software Freedom Conservancy, we have historically hosted our main Git repositories, but have used GitHub as a mirror. We urge our member projects and community members to avoid GitHub (and all proprietary software development frameworks and services), but that wasn't enough. Today we take a firmer stance.
With this, the Software Freedom Conservancy announces that it ends the use of GitHub and at the same time it also announces a long-term plan to help free projects migrate off of GitHub.
It is also worth mentioning that as such the Software Freedom Conservancy does not require existing member projects to migrate at this time, but what will be done from now on is that new projects from members that do not have a long-term plan to migrate away from GitHub.
He finally mentions that there are so many good reasons to quit GitHub and shared a list of the top ones on his Give Up On GitHub site.
If you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details In the following link.