FOSS

Introduction I don’t know how to introduce this post other than the question in the title: is it even worth working on Free and Open Source Software anymore? I have been asking myself this for the past week or two, and it’s uncomfortable for me; I believe in the power of Open Source to empower users and to give them control over their machines. Exploited FOSS But that belief of mine has been severely shaken by several things happened this week, things which also made me reconsider things that happened further in the past as well....

In July, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) put out a call for whitepapers about the “philosophical and legal questions” around GitHub’s Copilot. I wanted to write one, but decided not to until encouraged to do so by an employee of the FSF. By that time, I only had five days to write it, so the paper ended being subpar, but I got it in. As to be expected, my paper was not chosen for publication, and I don’t blame them....

Update, 08 July 2021: GitHub has confirmed that all public code that was on their servers was used to train Copilot. That means some of my code was used, though it was older versions. I suggest deleting all code off of GitHub if you can. GitHub has been on my radar before, and it wasn’t for a good reason. Well, it’s on my radar again, and it’s once again not for a good reason: Copilot....