These are the immediate "products" GitHub provides, however, I would argue it provides a lot more.

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.

You are right about the benefits GitHub provides to the FOSS community but I don't think that was ever the stated goal of this company. Their goal is to make profit, not foster FOSS, so we shouldn't be surprised when they make decisions that benefit their bottom line.

I definitely never contributed to open source before github was around.

It is objectively not ludicrous. It might go against the commonly taught idea that businesses should focus solely on generating profits, but it is not unreasonable to create a system where businesses have to keep the common good in mind.

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 not just a "commonly taught idea that businesses should focus solely on generating profit", it's the fundamental principle upon which economies are built today almost anywhere in the world. Sure, there are other ways of organizing economic systems, but to suggest that we are simply or easily going to switch to one is unrealistic. Imagining and wanting a different status quo will not lead to a different status quo, especially if all we are doing is making demands on others to change their behavior and use their property in ways that we want. In other words, if we want a different status quo, we won't get it by bitching about GitHub but by building a competitor company that does things the way we want it.

> It's not just a "commonly taught idea that businesses should focus solely on generating profit", it's the fundamental principle upon which economies are built today almost anywhere in the world.

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.

I think you're actually both right, in different ways.

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 did not suggest it would be easy and also, someone has to imagine a competitor company before it can exist.

> the view that businesses should operate like non profits or government services

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.

Not the argument being made at all, Github is free to do whatever it is doing. We just shouldn't use it, if we care about our and our users' freedom.

Realistically I'm not leaving GitHub anytime soon and I do agree that businesses need a way of making money. I'm generally fine with a free service that also restricts certain features to paying customers and I think that GitHub worked well with that formula so far. But I don't like the double standard highlighted in this article about Copilot: they are training their IA on Open Source repos and using the result without taking into account possible licenses incompatibilities by making an argument about this being comparable to a compiler's output, but at the same time they are not using their proprietary codebase to train it to protect their own intellectual property. I'm not saying that businesses have to provide stuff for free, I'm just saying that there are if not more legal at least more ethical ways of making money, because as it stands now it seems to me that Copilot is in a legal gray area.

Why is it ludicrous?