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Rant: Stop whatever you are doing and learn how licenses work +

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 2 minute read + + + +

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Recently, Github announced +that they are making Github Copilot available for everyone. Previously, it was in Beta and you could get it through the waiting list. +When I saw the news, I thought I can give it a try. But not so surprisingly it was not free. You have 3 ways to get it:

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  • Pay the subscription fee and get it.
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  • Prove you are a student and get it for free.
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  • Be a maintainer of a popular repository and get it for free.
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I think I should be able to use it for free because I am a student but apparently they are not convinced yet. Anyways, that is a different +story. I don’t care if they will give me access to Github Copilot or not. It is not a big deal for me.

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But some people were really angry about how Github Team being vague while defining the criteria as “being a maintainer of a popular open source project”. +I think they are right to some extent. If all you need is having a few thousands stars for a project, you could easily get that. I know a lot of troll +or low effort repositories that get a lot of stars because they are funny.

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Later, I found another tweet that explains how Github decides what is popular. According to +this tweet, if you have a repository that is in top 1000 in one of the most popular 34 languages, you are eligible to get Github Copilot for free. +This is better than the previous definition but you can still argue that it is not fair because one can create a package for checking if a number is +even or not and get thousands of stars.

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You can criticize this, I get that. But do not come up with silly arguments to justify yourself. Like how on earth would you think that Github is doing +something bad because $10/month is too much for this service? It is business man, you pay if you think it is worth it. That’s it. “I joined beta program +and it was free, now they want to charge me if I want to continue using it. They did not tell me that.” Uhhm… What? Are you aware that what you are using +is another company’s service and they have all rights to do whatever they want with their service? How you guys even can think of like that?! This is crazy!

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Some people argue that what Github is doing is wrong because they used open source projects without consent. Another similar argument is that what +Github is doing is evil because they used projects developed by community and now they are selling it without giving any money to the contributors of +these projects. Do you guys even have an idea what licenses stands for? If you don’t want to some random person use your code, just license it that +way. And if you licensed it with a GPL compatible or similar license you already gave rights anyone to use or sell your code. That is not Github’s +problem. That is your problem not understanding how licenses work. Stop complaining.

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