* They make money from Co-Pilot? Great!
* They sell software to ICE? Good. Why wouldn’t they? I’m not interested in anti-immigration-enforcement politics.
* They’re a closed-source for-profit company? Great! That’s why their product is high quality.
That's a huge stretch for a few reasons. First, the reliability of GitHub.com is very poor and it has had tens of incidents in the past few months. Second, their hosted solution, GitHub Enterprise, is notoriously poor, difficult to maintain, always late with features. Third, their main competitor, GitLab, which is open core, was kicking their ass for years with features and quality until GitHub got the unlimited funds of Microsoft to be able to even come close. More to the point, there are tons of good quality open source software, and tons of really poor quality closed source. Openness of code matters little for quality (besides the fact that with open source at least you have the option to see why and fix).
Regarding Copilot, they're ignoring licenses, training models on everybody's code, and selling the result as a service. Sounds very sketchy.
OK let me take your projects and make money from them and not give you anything in return, not even credit.
> They sell software to ICE? Good. Why wouldn’t they? I’m not interested in anti-immigration-enforcement politics.
ICE policies aside, you should be interested in immigration politics because they're important to people and businesses. Apathy is a bad thing here.
> They’re a closed-source for-profit company? Great! That’s why their product is high quality.
hahahaha, there are plenty of open-source not-for-profit companies with high quality products and many many many more closed-source for-profit companies with terrible products. See also Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office.
Burning coal for generating energy was very "successful" and had great adoption. It's still a terrible method for the environment, and we can feel free to regard it as negative.
In this analogy, Microsoft products would be like generating energy by burning garbage, aka a dumpster fire.
> because burning garbage for energy when the alternative is a US style landfill is literally better in every way.
Now that you say it, I do remember reading that Sweden burns garbage for energy. I would have thought that the main problem would be arbitrary emissions from the plant, but from the plan of a typical one, those are trapped and/or filtered [1]. I still think that in the US this would be harder, since people are probably prone to throwing more things in the garbage than they should; and don't recycle as much as the Swedes do.
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[1] https://www.americanprogress.org/article/energy-from-waste-c...
I am lucky that I can avoid their products. But millions of users and orgs can't because that's what others around them use. So they're stuck with it no matter how much worse it is than open-source alternatives.
(and yes, that is trivially simple. If your software can't do that in a performant way, you don't understand what product you're trying to out-compete)
It's not that there's no alternative, it's that the alternatives are just not good enough when it comes to "I need this stupidly complicated thing, thanks to 20 years of spreadsheet formula history at my organization that I have zero power to even remotely change, done in seconds. Not minutes".
This is one hundred percent okay with me and many other open source contributors. It's a no-strings-attached donation to mankind, and if someone else finds value in it, you don't complain, you cheer. Who needs attribution when people are actually _using_ something you made; you saved someone a good deal of time trying to write a solution themselves, perhaps.
That's fine if your project says that. But there are a very many of projects which specifically say otherwise.
edit: Not implying you're wrong, just moreso that there's a large chunk of people who aren't going to be motivated to fight on your behalf. I understand there are some useful areas such as hardware drivers for GPL, but it's simply not an IP constraint that sounds at all fun to work on as a volunteer.
I guess this just all seems rather activist to me but people aren't seeing the big picture; our jobs as programmers are about to change in a very big way. It won't be long before more competition enters the space (e.g. Salesforce and Amazon) and ultimately it won't matter if this model saw some GPL/MIT code because the next one will work twice as well without having seen any of it.
You will at least save some people some effort they go to in order to collect and provide attributions to every piece of code used.
So? Is "activist" supposed to carry a negative connotation, or what?
Like, maybe you could all get together and learn how machine learning works and train your own clean model? That feels far more positive and in the spirit of progress to me. I guess from my point of view it's clear - no laws will save you from the next wave of large language models. The weights are trivially distributed meaning once it's trained it's more just a fact of life we all have to deal with. So making demands when you have basically zero leverage rather than admitting defeat and working within the new constraints of progress.
I just feel like it's an inherently philosophical position and people are acting like code theft hasn't been common practice for the history of all software.
See git itself.