After YouTube-dl incident, GitHub's DMCA process now includes free legal help

GitHub's announcement:

https://github.blog/2021-07-27-github-developer-rights-fello...

"GitHub’s Developer Defense Fund will enable independent legal support from the Stanford Juelsgaard Clinic to review and handle appropriate DMCA cases for developers on GitHub and across the software ecosystem." (at no cost to the developers)

This is the first action in this mess that improved my trust in github. To date, they've felt spineless.

If this is a permanent thing, neutral, honest, and used without prejudice, you can count my trust restored.

Funding legal aid seems like the exact right solution. It's ethically the right way to handle it. It takes github out of the role of being judge, jury, and executioner, which is not a good place to be, either ethically or businesswise. github shouldn't be making moral calls, where people will differ. github also has very bounded liability -- cost of a lawyer -- rather than massive damages.

I'll wait to see if github folds when a non-PC case comes up, or one with genuinely bad actors. Ideally, they ought to structure this so they can't fold -- they have something in their ToS which makes this nondiscriminatory -- so no one gets annoyed.

Everyone deserves a lawyer in a situation like this. Even the bad guys.

And you don't actually know who the bad guys are before due process.

Microsoft messed up a lot but they are doing a lot of cool things for quite a few years now. It it hard to believe they converted but it makes a lot of business sense: keeps devs happy, make software for major platforms, keep pushing into businesses. The giving away creates enough goodwill to forget the crap of before and not get the blowback on the (good or bad) closed source software. It is like Gates Foundation: you know it's tax write-offs or whatever negative spin someone wants to give to it: it is money to good causes that otherwise is not there. And very large amounts of it, in both cases IMHO.

I am still in denial, that company such as Microsoft seems like so far genuinely embarrassing open source community.