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Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

theregister.com

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Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#21

Post by gchamonlive »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #6

People have been voluntarily letting Microsoft host their code for years now. And before that they posted their open source code to a centralized site that wasn't open source. This is one of those things where of course it was going to happen. GitHub was VC funded, they were going to either exit to a big company or try to become one. Eventually the bill was going to come due and everyone knew this. You can choose to…

Even though you are right, that misses the point terribly.

It's like using Instagram or Facebook. It's not at all a matter of individual choice when all your friends are on one single platform.

Sure you can host your code anywhere, but by not using GitHub you are potentially missing out on a very vibrant community.

It's all Microsoft to blame. It bought the medium and took an entire community hostage in the process just for the sake of profit.

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#22

Post by gchamonlive »

politelemon wrote: post #19
Y_Y wrote: post #4

How on earth was Microsoft allowed to buy such a critical piece of tech infrastructure?

It wasn't critical at that time. But then who made it critical over the intervening years? That's on us. It's easy to knee jerk on HN but let's try to do better than this.

When Microsoft bought GH it was already the most popular forge by far, which is why it was bought in the first place.

> But then who made it critical over the intervening years? That's on us.

That's blaming the victim. The vast majority of the opensource projects were hosted on GH since before Microsoft's acquisition. I remember back in 2018 when my team made the decision to move from bitbucket to GitHub, the main consideration was the platform quality but also the community we were getting access to.

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#24

Post by bgwalter »

Corporate overreach like this happens if most open source developers no longer speak up because they want to be hired or retain their positions. They delude themselves if they think that attitude provides them any security. The opposite is the case: corporations will use the sycophants, secretly laugh about them and fire them if they have served their purpose. As in the case of the Google and Microsoft firings of Python core developers.

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#25

Post by layer8 »

gchamonlive wrote: post #21
ants_everywhere wrote: post #6

People have been voluntarily letting Microsoft host their code for years now. And before that they posted their open source code to a centralized site that wasn't open source. This is one of those things where of course it was going to happen. GitHub was VC funded, they were going to either exit to a big company or try to become one. Eventually the bill was going to come due and everyone knew this. You can choose to…

Even though you are right, that misses the point terribly. It's like using Instagram or Facebook. It's not at all a matter of individual choice when all your friends are on one single platform. Sure you can host your code anywhere, but by not using GitHub you are potentially missing out on a very vibrant community. It's all Microsoft to blame. It bought the medium and took an entire community hostage in the process j…

While Microsoft is certainly to blame, GP is also right that the problem wouldn’t exist if people hadn’t continued en masse to have their code hosted on a centralized proprietary and (since 2012) VC-funded platform in the first place.

As an aside, I don’t really see GitHub as a whole as a community. It’s a go-to place with network effects, but network effects doesn’t by itself imply “community”.

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#26

Post by kelvinjps10 »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #6

People have been voluntarily letting Microsoft host their code for years now. And before that they posted their open source code to a centralized site that wasn't open source. This is one of those things where of course it was going to happen. GitHub was VC funded, they were going to either exit to a big company or try to become one. Eventually the bill was going to come due and everyone knew this. You can choose to…

Wasn't GitHub initially bootstrapped?

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#27

Post by the__alchemist »

daemin wrote: post #12

I read this article and then looked at my Github and a few other projects and found no issues created by Copilot. As someone else has said they need to be triggered manually, so therefore it's the same sort of problem as with the Curl project bug bounty, where people would be spamming with automatically LLM generated fictional problems. In that case because there's a potential for money to be made, and in the Github…

Same experience. Does anyone have info on this discrepancy in observations?

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#28

Post by gchamonlive »

layer8 wrote: post #25
gchamonlive wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even though you are right, that misses the point terribly. It's like using Instagram or Facebook. It's not at all a matter of individual choice when all your friends are on one single platform. Sure you can host your code anywhere, but by not using GitHub you are potentially missing out on a very vibrant community. It's all Microsoft to blame. It bought the medium and took an entire community hostage in the process j…

While Microsoft is certainly to blame, GP is also right that the problem wouldn’t exist if people hadn’t continued en masse to have their code hosted on a centralized proprietary and (since 2012) VC-funded platform in the first place. As an aside, I don’t really see GitHub as a whole as a community. It’s a go-to place with network effects, but network effects doesn’t by itself imply “community”.

Yeah, I said that first thing. It's right but it misses the point.

Being VC backed isn't a deciding factor for adopting a forge. It's the community that drives adoption.

> I don’t really see GitHub as a whole as a community.

It's basically a social network on top of a source code forge. You have a profile that is individually identifiable, you can open issues and contribute to discussions on pull requests. All this can be tracked back to every individual while they collaborate and make connections while they contribute to each other. How is this not a community?

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#29

Post by bapak »

latexr wrote: post #17
airstrike wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no law against that, so I'm not sure what you're suggesting. And git lives on regardless of GitHub

> There is no law against that Regulators can (and do) stop purchases which can be considered harmful to consumers. Just look at the Adobe/Figma deal.

If GitHub were to close tomorrow, you'd lose out on the social part temporarily, but there are effectively dozens of providers and solutions that could replace it.

The same could not be said for Figma, where if lost, you'd end up looking at the company that tried to buy it. That's what those laws are for.

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#30

Post by madeofpalk »

IshKebab wrote: post #5

Is this actually a real problem? Note it says "forced Copilot features" and > the most popular community discussion in the past 12 months has been a request for a way to block Copilot, the company's AI service, from generating issues and pull requests in code repositories. but Microsoft doesn't automatically make these issues and PRs. Users have to trigger it. I mean, I do think you should be able to block the `copil…

As a paid/commercial OSS maintainer, I haven't seen this from the public either. People occasionally submit low-effort PRs or issues, probably from Claude or ChatGPT or whatever, but I don't feel to bothered dealing with them. Of course, I'm fortunate enough to be paid for this.

I think it's just an unfortunate fact now in 2025 that if you look after a text box online, you're going to have to deal with AI sludge in one way or another. If you don't want to do that, close the text box.

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