> The way I read the article was that by being on GitHub, you are implicitly agreeing to no longer be a FOSS project as regards licensing.
In this case, they have violated our license. The license states how it cannot be changed, and implicit changes by the hosting company is not one of them. Isn't there a legal case here? If no, then the license is not violated. This makes me wonder why not take Github to court vs a tamper tantrum (we're taking our marbles and going home!)
> the other stuff you said is...kind of irrelevant.
It goes to show that Github is providing really, an excellent service to FOSS. We could migrate to GitLab, though, why?
I know that sounds like 'fan-boy', but the list is large, useful, and all highly available and free to FOSS. By those measure, it's a good service.
> Sure, you get a lot of convenience from GitHub.
The items are more than convenience, they are core to our application and project. Uprooting them is not a small task.
The automatic integration with issues is excellent for example, before we did that - we had no idea how many users were seeing errors. We run a thick client that is downloaded and added an integration to upload error reports to github issues. That has been pretty invaluable. So, we have to move all that, to another host: who is to say that other host will always be a better FOSS steward? who is to say that other host has anyone near the level of features? An integrated CI/CD and hosting of release artifacts is huge.
So, on the premise that our license has been violated, instead of sue'ing, we should take our FOSS somewhere else? Again, the list is large, we need to migrate all of that. It took a long time to get out of sourceforge, it's not even more work to get out of github because we automated so much (to allow our team to scale better). It's not just a matter of 'convenience' to go somewhere that is feature-sub-par and spend the better part of a year to do that and nothing else.
> This makes me wonder why not take Github to court vs a tamper tantrum (we're taking our marbles and going home!)
Mainly because it might be more in line with traditional FOSS ideals to take our marbles and go home? It's hardly a temper tantrum. After the Linux kernel got into one too many arguments with Bitkeeper, there was an inflection point where Torvalds got fed up and just wrote git instead. I think this is an inflection point like that. And "taking Github to court" is much easier said than done for a FOSS project, although I assume that someone will be doing that at some point.
> So, we have to move all that, to another host: who is to say that other host will always be a better FOSS steward? who is to say that other host has anyone near the level of features? An integrated CI/CD and hosting of release artifacts is huge.
In addition to GitLab, I think Sourcehut offers similar features and is also FOSS (AGPLv3).
> So, on the premise that our license has been violated, instead of sue'ing, we should take our FOSS somewhere else? Again, the list is large, we need to migrate all of that.
I don't think anyone is telling you what to do, just offering suggestions. My suggestion is that switching to a forge that respects FOSS is a reasonable alternative to legal action against GitHub or just ignoring the potential license violations via Copilot. You can of course choose any of the alternatives, or the status quo; which is what you seem to have largely convinced yourself is fine. Good luck, and thanks for working on FOSS anyway!
In this case, they have violated our license. The license states how it cannot be changed, and implicit changes by the hosting company is not one of them. Isn't there a legal case here? If no, then the license is not violated. This makes me wonder why not take Github to court vs a tamper tantrum (we're taking our marbles and going home!)
> the other stuff you said is...kind of irrelevant.
It goes to show that Github is providing really, an excellent service to FOSS. We could migrate to GitLab, though, why?
I know that sounds like 'fan-boy', but the list is large, useful, and all highly available and free to FOSS. By those measure, it's a good service.
> Sure, you get a lot of convenience from GitHub.
The items are more than convenience, they are core to our application and project. Uprooting them is not a small task.
The automatic integration with issues is excellent for example, before we did that - we had no idea how many users were seeing errors. We run a thick client that is downloaded and added an integration to upload error reports to github issues. That has been pretty invaluable. So, we have to move all that, to another host: who is to say that other host will always be a better FOSS steward? who is to say that other host has anyone near the level of features? An integrated CI/CD and hosting of release artifacts is huge.
So, on the premise that our license has been violated, instead of sue'ing, we should take our FOSS somewhere else? Again, the list is large, we need to migrate all of that. It took a long time to get out of sourceforge, it's not even more work to get out of github because we automated so much (to allow our team to scale better). It's not just a matter of 'convenience' to go somewhere that is feature-sub-par and spend the better part of a year to do that and nothing else.
[edits] Clarity, conciseness