It’s easy to say “our rights are being stripped away” but the view that businesses should operate like non profits or government services with the common good in mind is ludicrous!
GitHub provides a place for people to easily collaborate on FOSS software. It has helped millions of people getting into software development or into their first FOSS project by lowering the barrier of entry significantly.
Can you imagine how many people would start contributing to FOSS early in their career if they had to deal with mailing lists, patch sending, multiple git remotes, rebasing, etc. all at once just to start providing a small contribution? - Probably not as many.
I don't support everything GitHub does and I do see CodePilot as problematic but the article opens with "Those who forget history often inadvertently repeat it.". - You know what has screwed us over a lot in recent history? Cancelling something/someone without thinking it through first. Oh the irony.
There is a difference between 'how things are now' and 'how things could be'. Imagining and wanting a different status quo is not by itself ludicrous (especially since we all stand to benefit from such businesses), it's a first step towards change.
It's hardly the fundamental principle. The fundamental principle is that people need things to survive and its more efficient if people specialize and trade than if everyone creates everything they need.
The pervase idea that businesses should focus solely on generating profit is also directly responsible for lots of problems almost anywhere in the world from driving out less vicious competitors to rent seeking to externalizing costs to everyone else e.g. via pollution.
Fairly self-evidently, the sane fundamental principle for a business is "make a good/provide a service, and if you do so well, you make a good profit".
Unfortunately, for the past few decades, businesses in the Western world (and particularly the US) have increasingly been operating based on a fundamental principle of "make as much money as you possibly can, and if you have to make a good/provide a service to do so, that's a necessary evil".
I don’t think that that is what is being asked here. Even if GitHub didn’t violate license terms, it would have ways to make money.