After 40 years in software engineering, I've learned to recognize when a platform stops serving its community and starts exploiting it. GitHub crossed that line. I've moved my projects to Codeberg, and I think you should consider doing the same.
The short version: GitHub is owned by Microsoft. Microsoft uses code hosted on GitHub to train AI models, including GitHub Copilot. I did not consent to my code being used this way. Neither did millions of other developers whose work now powers a $19/month subscription service.
That's it, that's the reason, But if you want the longer version, keep reading.
When Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion in 2018, many of us were concerned. GitHub had become the de facto home for open source development, and Microsoft's historical relationship with open source was adversarial at best. Remember "Linux is a cancer"? Microsoft assured the community that GitHub would remain independent. Then came Copilot.
GitHub Copilot is an AI coding assistant trained on billions of lines of code from public GitHub repositories. According to GitHub's own statements, the training data includes code licensed under GPL, MIT, Apache, and other open source licenses. These licenses have requirements: attribution, share-alike provisions, and other terms that exist for good reasons. Copilot ignores all of them.
When Copilot suggests code to a developer, it provides no attribution. It doesn't indicate which license the original code was under. It doesn't tell you if that suggestion came from a GPL-licensed project that would require your derivative work to also be GPL-licensed. It just outputs code and leaves you holding the bag for any license violations.
GitHub's former CEO claimed that "training ML systems on public data is fair use" and "the output belongs to the operator, just like with a compiler." This is a bold legal theory that has never been tested in court, until now.
In November 2022, a class-action lawsuit was filed against GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI by the Joseph Saveri Law Firm and Matthew Butterick, an open source programmer and attorney. The lawsuit alleges violations of open source licenses and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The case is ongoing. In June 2024, a judge dismissed several claims, including the primary DMCA claim, finding that Copilot's output wasn't identical enough to the original code to constitute a violation. However, two significant claims survived: breach of contract (GitHub's own terms of service) and open source license violations.
An appeal was filed in October 2024 and this case is far from over.
Regardless of how the courts ultimately rule, the ethical problem remains. Open source developers contributed their work under specific terms. Microsoft took that work, fed it into a proprietary system, and now charges $19/month for access. The open source community built something valuable through collective effort, and a trillion-dollar corporation is monetizing it without respecting the terms under which it was shared.
The Software Freedom Conservancy, a nonprofit that supports free and open source software projects, quit GitHub in June 2022 and urged other developers to do the same. Their statement is worth reading in full, but the core argument is simple: "Launching a for-profit product that disrespects the FOSS community in the way Copilot does simply makes the weight of GitHub's bad behavior too much to bear."
The SFC tried for over a year to get answers from Microsoft and GitHub about Copilot's training data, the legal basis for their fair use claims, and why they trained on open source code but not on proprietary Windows code. GitHub refused to engage.
That silence tells you everything you need to know about how Microsoft views the open source community: as a resource to be extracted, not a partner to be respected.
The AI training issue is the most egregious problem, but it's not the only one. GitHub is proprietary software built on top of Git, an open source tool specifically designed to enable distributed, decentralized development. GitHub has systematically added features that create lock-in and centralization, the opposite of what Git was built for.
Every issue, pull request, discussion, and wiki page you create on GitHub lives in a proprietary database that you cannot fully export. Your contribution graph, your followers, your repository stars, all of that lives on Microsoft's servers, under Microsoft's control.
And let's not forget that GitHub has a contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. When GitHub employees and community members raised concerns about this, GitHub's response was dismissive.
I moved my projects to Codeberg. It's a nonprofit, community-run Git hosting service based in Germany with strong privacy protections. It runs on Forgejo, a community fork of Gitea that explicitly exists to prevent corporate capture.
Codeberg has everything I need: full Git hosting with tags and releases, issue tracking, CI/CD through Woodpecker, no AI training on my code, no telemetry, no ads, no venture capital demanding growth at any cost.
For my COSMIC desktop applets, the workflow is simple: I develop on Codeberg, tag releases there, and submit pull requests to the cosmic-flatpak repository on GitHub when needed. GitHub becomes a delivery mechanism, not my home.
I'm not going to tell you that leaving GitHub is easy. It's not. GitHub has network effects that make it the default choice for collaboration. Many employers require it. Many open source projects live there.
But every developer who moves to an alternative weakens GitHub's grip. Every project that hosts its canonical repository elsewhere demonstrates that alternatives exist. Every conversation about why developers are leaving puts pressure on Microsoft to change its behavior, or at least makes other developers think twice about where they host their work.
Here's what you can do: Evaluate your options. Codeberg, GitLab (self-hosted community edition), sourcehut, and self-hosted Forgejo are all viable alternatives. Start with new projects. You don't have to migrate everything at once. Put your next project somewhere else. Mirror strategically. If you need GitHub for discoverability or collaboration, mirror your repository there but keep your canonical source elsewhere. Talk about it. When people ask why you moved, tell them. The more developers understand what Microsoft is doing with their code, the more will consider alternatives.
I spent 40 years writing software. I've seen platforms come and go. I watched SourceForge go from essential infrastructure to adware-infested cautionary tale. I'm watching GitHub follow the same trajectory, except this time the exploitation is more sophisticated.
Your code has value. The terms under which you share it matter. Don't let a trillion-dollar corporation pretend otherwise.
My COSMIC applets are now hosted at https://codeberg.org/VintageTechie. The GitHub repositories have been archived with a pointer to the new location.
Top comments (0)