Some Angry GitHub Users Are Rebelling Against GitHub's Forced Copilot AI Features

Slashdot reader Charlotte Web shared this report from the Register: Among the software developers who use Microsoft's GitHub, 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. The second most popular discussion — where popularity is measured in upvotes — is a bug report that seeks a fix for the inability of users to disable Copilot code reviews. Both of these questions, the first opened in May and the second opened a month ago, remain unanswered, despite an abundance of comments critical of generative AI and Copilot...

The author of the first, developer Andi McClure, published a similar request to Microsoft's Visual Studio Code repository in January, objecting to the reappearance of a Copilot icon in VS Code after she had uninstalled the Copilot extension... "I've been for a while now filing issues in the GitHub Community feedback area when Copilot intrudes on my GitHub usage," McClure told The Register in an email. "I deeply resent that on top of Copilot seemingly training itself on my GitHub-posted code in violation of my licenses, GitHub wants me to look at (effectively) ads for this project I will never touch. If something's bothering me, I don't see a reason to stay quiet about it. I think part of how we get pushed into things we collectively don't want is because we stay quiet about it."

It's not just the burden of responding to AI slop, an ongoing issue for Curl maintainer Daniel Stenberg. It's the permissionless copying and regurgitation of speculation as fact, mitigated only by small print disclaimers that generative AI may produce inaccurate results. It's also GitHub's disavowal of liability if Copilot code suggestions happen to have reproduced source code that requires attribution. It's what the Servo project characterizes in its ban on AI code contributions as the lack of code correctness guarantees, copyright issues, and ethical concerns. Similar objections have been used to justify AI code bans in GNOME's Loupe project, FreeBSD, Gentoo, NetBSD, and QEMU... Calls to shun Microsoft and GitHub go back a long way in the open source community, but moved beyond simmering dissatisfaction in 2022 when the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) urged free software supporters to give up GitHub, a position SFC policy fellow Bradley M. Kuhn recently reiterated.
McClure says In the last six months their posts have drawn more community support — and tells the Register there's been a second change in how people see GitHub within the last month. After GitHub moved from a distinct subsidiary to part of Microsoft's CoreAI group, "it seems to have galvanized the open source community from just complaining about Copilot to now actively moving away from GitHub."

MS Reverse Midas Touch

[Vinegar Joe]

Microsoft turns everything it touches into shit.

Re: MS Reverse Midas Touch

[SuperDre]

Yeah, that's why it's still so popular...

Re: MS Reverse Midas Touch

[SVSD]

Theyâ(TM)re lucky people still use it out of inertia. Thereâ(TM)s also the big social network advantage. But as more people will push back against big company managed communities like GitHub, the more smaller, open, communities will develop.

Re:

[StormReaver]

They're lucky people still use it out of inertia.

I specifically never hosted anything on Github because it was Microsoft, and I know Microsoft's history. Microsoft called me for an interview when I was a sophomore in college in the 90's, and I told them to piss off.

The only reason I created an account was so I could report Godot bugs to the developers. If Godot switched to a different provider, I would close my Github account without a second thought.

Re:

[arglebargle_xiv]

Unless you're some significant project with global recognition you pretty much have to host on Github nowadays otherwise your project is more or less invisible I know of several OSS projects that (reluctantly) moved to there after their traditional web site + mailing list approach went moribund over the last 5-10 years.

Re:

[dargaud]

Isn't gitlab just about as big ? The only drawback I see to using gitlab is that there's no traffic statistics per project (number of downloads or clone).

Re:

[arglebargle_xiv]

No idea sorry. Everything I use seems to be hosted on github, and if you try and comment on something outside of there you get directed to the github Issues page.

Re: MS Reverse Midas Touch

[toutankh]

This comment is out of touch with reality. GitHub was the most popular open source repository before Microsoft acquired it, and people don't like change. Microsoft is really good at making it hard or annoying to leave them, not necessarily due to the quality of their products. For example I don't think I have ever heard anyone say they like working with Teams, yet people find they're stuck with it because someone above them made a decision that was not based on technical merit.

Re:

[UnknowingFool]

For all the people I know, companies had Teams as it came with Office in the past. Our IT department wanted everyone to use it instead of Zoom as it was free while Zoom had additional licensing costs. No one did. Now that Teams is a separate cost, the IT department no longer encourages people to use it. Personally I keep it from loading and staying in the background as I have caught it using 100% cpu for absolutely no reason many times.

Re:

[unrtst]

Sharing a similar anecdote... a former employer went from company provided email and a variety of whatever chat apps we were using (from IRC, SILC, AOL IM, Mumble, and Hangouts), to requiring everyone use MS Linc, which turned into Skype for Business, and eventually to MS Teams. Email went from an inhouse open source solution, to MS Exchange on prem, to Office365, and then to restricting client access to only MS Outlook (no third party email clients). More and more beholden to MS, fewer and fewer features a

Re: MS Reverse Midas Touch

[SuperDre]

Show me an application like Teams that integrates so perfectly with other applications, it just works great.

Re: MS Reverse Midas Touch

[toutankh]

I prefer interoperability over integration. I have used Teams in different jobs. I have also used the Google tools (calendar, meet, mail, etc) with Slack. I much prefer the latter. I have had countless issues with external guests in meetings with Teams, but this has never been an issue with Meet. It's also easier on my CPU. You can start a Google Meet call from Slack. You can collaborate on a Google Drive document from Slack. You can update internal databases with information from Google calendar, which mea

Re:

[stealth_finger]

Yeah, that's why it's still so popular...

Because the only other option is mac which is somehow even worse but ms seem to want to be trying to turn in to.

Re:

[karmawarrior]

This is probably going to surprise you, as you're relatively new here, but there's actually some major third options too, and some are better.

The problem isn't that the alternatives are worse, it's the network effects. If you can't actually use the software you're required to use, or you don't have the right skillset because you've been trained on an increasingly proprietary UI ("The Ribbon" for example), then you can't easily use the alternatives.

That said, most people could use, say, Debian+MATE, and find

Re:

[stealth_finger]

Firstly, I'm not new here. Secondly, ok yeah I should have said viable because while there are a million flavours of linux they all have issues like you said. Unless John Q Public can just install it or buy a pc with it on and it runs all the programs and games (or enough of them) it'll probably stay specialist and hobbyist.

Re:

[Tokolosh]

You should make up a new word for this process.

Licenses

[SuperDre]

âGitHub-posted code in violation of my licensesâ Except Githubs usage terms trump your own license. If you don't agree, you should move away from Github. Terms of service change over the course of years. I understand why she hates the co-pilot addition, but it's their product (now), and nobody forces you to use Github or Visual Code/studio.

Re:

[dskoll]

I deleted all but one of my GitHub repos a while back. This article reminded me to delete the final one.

Moved them all to three mirrors: self-hosted Forgejo, Codeberg and salsa.debian.org. There was really only one repo that attracted outside developers and PRs, and that can as easily be done on Codeberg as on GitHub.

Re:

[sjames]

Well, let's see. Developers made a non-MS choice, so MS bought it and shoved itself into the relationship. Shades of "NO means no".

Well, I guess M$ was going ...

[Qbertino]

... to screw this one up eventually.

What really surprises me about Nadellas M$ is that is actually pretty decent, by M$ standards that is. VS Code is a really neat contribution to the FOSS community and to open standards, as is TypeScript. Some neat surprises on that front in the last decade, I have to admit.

The silver lining is that this is Git. Building your own Github replacement borders on the trivial, as is changing your upstream SPoT repo.

What I absolutely love about Git is that it's a protocol designed and built by someone who knew what he was doing (Linus Torwalds) resulting in the fact that migrating your upstream Git Repo away from a commercial service like Github takes something like 20 seconds, if you're having a slow day.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

They've been doing bad things to github already.

What I don't get is why anyone didn't just go to gitlab when it was announced that Microsoft was buying github. Did they think that they would be benevolent overlords? You have to ignore almost their entire history to believe that.

Re:Well, I guess M$ was going ...

[_merlin]

GitLab is dreadful. It's borderline unusable in all sorts of ways.

For example the only way to change your 2FA TOTP shared secret is to disable and then re-enable 2FA. It took a lot of searching to find some forum post that mentioned this.

Another thing is that there's no way to renew a personal access token. There's an option to refresh a token, but the new token will have the same expiry date, so if you have a token that expires soon, it won't do what you want, you'll just have a new token that expires at the same time. You need to create a new token. The maximum validity period is a year (there's a way to change this on a private GitLab instance, but not on a project on gitlab.com), but the default expiry date it had selected when I tried to create new tokens to replace my expiring ones was a day later than what it would accept. The error message was completely unhelpful. I eventually tried changing the expiry to one day earlier than the default selection and worked out what was going on.

The size limits for release files are way too small to be useful. If you provide binary downloads, you need to host them elsewhere anyway (e.g. SourceForge FRS or GitHub releases).

Pushing a large number of revisions at once often gives an error, so you need to gingerly move the branch forward, hoping you aren't pushing too many revisions at once. SourceForge doesn't have this issue.

It provides nothing equivalent to GitHub Actions CI, so if you want something similar, you'll need to host it elsewhere.

GitLab really isn't a viable replacement for GitHub. Usability is crap, it chokes on large pushes, it can't be used to serve release downloads, and it doesn't provide a CI service.

Re:

[reynolds_john]

I can tell you why. Look back a few years ago when their pricing literally doubled almost overnight. Go Google their cost increases over the years. Also, how they took existing features in a tier and shifted them to a more expensive tier, leaving people in the cold. It's why I scrambled to move from GitLab to Gitea a couple years back.

The modern lesson for us all is this: once VC money or going public is assured, just start the clock. Because you'll be parting with more of your money "real soon now".

Re:

[gweihir]

You have to ignore almost their entire history to believe that.

Most people are really good at ignoring history. Explains most crap the human race is doing and there is a lot of it.

Re:

[allo]

I really wonder why github is unable to render issue comments without javascript and cookies enabled. That's (for reading) a static page, why does it depend on cookies and scripts? Not long ago it was no problem to read the comments with lynx, if you wanted to.

Re:

[phantomfive]

S Code is a really neat contribution to the FOSS community and to open standards, as is TypeScript. Some neat surprises on that front in the last decade, I have to admit

The programming languages team at Microsoft is/was a bright spot for a long time. Anders Hejlsberg knows what he is doing, and even if you don't like C#, it has a lot of interesting pieces (like LINQ). [wikipedia.org]

The main thing seems to be that the Microsoft execs don't meddle.

Re:

[tender-matser]

> migrating your upstream Git Repo away from a commercial service like Github takes something like 20 seconds

except for the automatic actions / workflows which you will have to implement yourself with docker/custom virtualization/etc

which is a tedious, time consuming task that I would rather leave to Microsoft and its paid minions ;-)

I use the non vendor-lock-in parts of GitHub

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

I only use GitHub as a dumb git repo for my open-source projects. That way, I never really have to interact with the website itself, my stuff isn't stuck there, and Microsoft doesn't get to invade my privacy and monetize my data.

In other words, I waste Microsoft's resources and they get nothing in return. That's why, despite by burning hatred of Microsoft, I host my stuff there. And I abuse the hell out of the storage capabilities too.

And therefore I never see any AI garbage from GitHub.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft doesn't get to invade my privacy and monetize my data

You still sent them your data, even if you aren't seeing their shitty UI.

Re:

[tender-matser]

And then what? If it's a free software project, all the data is out there for anyone to see and train their bots on.

They win nothing by hosting public data themselves instead of having to fetch it from another website.

Re:

[allo]

So maybe the bad AI code people complain about gets better then.

Re:

[RazorSharp]

Unfortunately very few projects did that.

Re:

[Z80a]

"Please do not say anything so the PR can put the spin i want on why the service is getting unpopular".

Leaving for less bad experience

[computer_tot]

I was one of the people who left GitHub this week.

Originally I created a GitHub account (back before Microsoft bought it) because that is where the developers were. People kept complaining to me that they wanted to contribute to my projects, but didn't want to do something so difficult as e-mailing a patch or using "old" technology like svn. The new devs are all about pull requests.

So I made a GitHub account and uploaded some of my projects there and I did get the pull request. But, over time, it's been a less and less good experience. I get almost no pull requests from real developers fixing real problems anymore. It's all AI slop and harassment and trolls and nagging from Microsoft to enable 2FA to enable tokens to upgrade to an Enterprise account. The GitHub experience is almost all pain and next to no benefit.

I've started migrating my projects to another platform that doesn't demand 2FA for a fun weekend project, doesn't try to up-sell, and doesn't push its automated crap into my projects.

Re: Leaving for less bad experience

[diffract]

I started using github about 2 months ago. I wasn't convinced at the beginning because of Microsoft, but developers who I considered much smarter than me were on it so I said what do I know. The token system to push anything was confusing af. My token expired recently and I can't be assed to relearn how to issue a new one and push

Re:

[leptons]

Not sure why you would even need version control for "a fun weekend project".

2FA (was Re:Leaving for less bad experience)

[dskoll]

I agree with everything you wrote except the 2FA part. Given supply chain attacks, if your open-source projects have any chance at all of developing a reasonable user-base, you should enable 2FA. I don't host any of my projects on platforms that don't support 2FA.

TOTP authenticator apps are free and easy to use. Use them! Or better yet, use a Yubikey or similar.

I had to switch from Google search to avoid AI

[fuzzyf]

The useless AI generated "This might be slightly related to what you searched for" response in every query I did, finally made switch to duckduckgo. I just couldn't stand the annoying incorrect blob of AI text after each search. Both for me spending time on either reading or scrolling by, and even more just the amount of energy required for something so useless in a massive scale.

This Always On AI "addons" are getting annoying.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... [mozilla.org]
https://chromewebstore.google.... [google.com]

troll for informative links

[drinkypoo]

This is what happens when you allow dipshits who know fuck all to moderate anonymously.

Some Angry GitHub Users

[Errol backfiring]

You mean the ones that are still there? Everyone I know who was on GitHub is moving to Codeberg or is already there. GitHub is enshittifying so hard that everyone is jumping ship.

Not just GitHub.

[devslash0]

This unbearable AI craze affects everything around us these days. People are increasingly working up to the realisation that AI can't be trusted, that it's all snake oil, and I guarantee that if there was a way to turn off AI in popular software, 99% of us would do it. But of course that wouldn't be good for business, for share prices, for those imaginary AI usage numbers, and that's why those who are forcefully pushing their AI agendas onto us will never allow us to be in control.

Re:

[KiltedKnight]

AI is mostly a toy, but it can also be a useful tool. Unfortunately it's becoming a crutch and something that's taking away critical thinking and research skills. Remember this one [slashdot.org] from about 6 weeks ago? Anything AI gives you as a result must be verified.

This is simple to fix

[djp2204]

Remove all your code from GitHub, today. Stop whining and fix the problem. Until you remove the code from Github, you will get the middle finger because at the end of the day Microsoft does not care what you think. Microsoft wants to use your work to train AI so it can replace you.

History self-repeats

[andywest]

I would like to remind you that what Microsoft is doing, in a general sense, is how SourceForge almost destroyed itself [codersnotes.com]. Microsoft executives apparently do not use Git, so they do not see how their actions threaten to destroy it.

Github is a loss. Please move, last year.

[BrendaEM]

I am sorry, but Microsoft knew exactly what it was doing when they acquired Github. Please make sure that key open source infrastructure is not attacked.

Sounds like a VS Code problem

[ahoffer0]

"git push" and "git pull" don't trigger any AI features for me. From what I can tell, the real issue is a Visual Studio Code plugin. I don't use VS Code and I'm not seeing an issue.

Re:

[TurboStar]

Yah, I turned it off too. The story seems to be about 3rd party AIs submitting tickets via the GitHub API. Or, more likely, the story is about someone getting outraged for views.

If something is useful...

[MpVpRb]

...people will choose it and often pay for it
The worst thing MS does is to force things on us that are either difficult or impossible to disable
This seems to be an admission that these "features" suck and nobody would choose them voluntarily

When they added Grok

[zendarva]

I canceled my copilot account. It was the only place microsoft was still getting money from me.

Microsoft

[RitchCraft]

The company that buys up other companies and services only to enshitify them later on. When a company or service is purchased by Microsoft that's your cue to start looking for an alternative.

Re:

[glowworm]

I wonder if Adobe should buy Microsoft, and make Windows a monthly subscription deal!?

Re:

[RitchCraft]

I'm sure something similar will happen sooner than later. As it stand now you couldn't get me to pay a penny for Windows. Hell, you would have to pay ME to use Windows 11.

Just Clone it

[Farley1]

Clone Github. Call it Not-Github. Profit.

A bigger issue for OSS could result

[Registered Coward v2]

A bigger issue, IMHO, is what happens when someone discovers OSS code in a commercial app and attempts to force the code to be released based on an OSS license. A court could ultimately have to decide how much code reuse is enough to make the OSS license binding even if the developer did not know they were incorporating OSS code. Whether Github can disclaim liability is a separate issue from the larger one of AI incorporating OSS code in suggestions it makes and how OSS licenses will apply in such an envir

Github is dead to me

[vilain]

I moved all my repos to codeberg.org shortly after the VP running github left. I only use the site now to check other people repos but my forks of that code are on codeberg.