Hi everyone,
I understand the frustration, and I share the instinct to protect the
work we've all put into this project. But I think it's worth stepping
back and looking at what has actually changed here, because I believe
the answer is: very little.
The LinuxCNC codebase is GPLv2. That means it has always been publicly
available, freely copyable, freely redistributable, and freely
modifiable by anyone on Earth. That's not a side effect of GitHub,
that's the entire point of the license we chose. Anyone has always been
able to download the full source, study it, learn from it, and build on
it. Copilot doing statistical analysis on publicly available GPL code
is, if anything, less than what the GPL already explicitly permits.
Mailing list archives have been indexed by Google, crawled by the
Wayback Machine, scraped by researchers, and read by recruiters for as
long as they've existed. Our commit messages, review comments, and
design discussions have been public and searchable for years. That was
true before Copilot, and it would remain true if we moved to GitLab,
Codeberg, or a self-hosted Gitea instance tomorrow. None of these
platforms prevent scraping.
GPL enforcement, even in clear-cut cases of actual license violation,
has historically been rare and difficult. The FSF and SFLC have pursued
only the most egregious cases, and even those took years. LinuxCNC
itself has never enforced the GPL against anyone. The idea of taking
drastic action over something that may not even constitute a violation
seems disproportionate.
If we migrate off GitHub, what do we actually gain? We lose CI
infrastructure that works, we lose contributor familiarity, we lose
discoverability for new contributors, we lose issue and PR history, and
we solve nothing, because the code was already scraped, the mailing
lists were already indexed, and the next platform will face the same
reality.
I'm not saying the concerns aren't valid. The feeling that volunteer
work is being used to train a commercial product without consent is
understandable. But the facts are: the code was always public, the
comments were always public, and the GPL never prevented anyone from
reading and learning from our work. What changed is our awareness of one
specific company doing it visibly. That awareness is worth something,
but it's not worth disrupting the project over.
We have real, concrete work to do, RTAI compatibility, the Ruckig
integration, EtherCAT improvements. I'd rather we spend our energy there
than on a migration that costs us real productivity and solves a problem
that doesn't have a technical solution.
@Bertho
Sorry I mailed you this privately, it was meant for the mailing list
Best regards,
Luca
On 3/26/2026 4:16 PM, Bertho Stultiens wrote:
Hi all,
The enshittification keeps on going:
https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/26/github_ai_training_policy_changes/
Can we please disable this in the master repo and every and all fork?
At least we must do so until the legal ramifications have been
resolved(*).
(*) It is currently not known what happens when code is copied
verbatim or marginally changed by any LLM and subsequently
incorporated in other projects. This would normally be considered a
very clear copyright violation because it has stripped both copyright
notices, attribution and the license by doing so.
If you want /your/ code to be used, then you are welcome to feed
/your/ code into whatever you like. However, we cannot decide the fate
of /other's/ code and have to abide by the license(s) granted to us.
We all are custodians of the code under those (FOSS) licenses and
cannot grant rights we do not own.
There is no reason to think that LLM automated copyright violations
would be allowable or legal. But, we need to wait for a clear
precedent before this issue has been resolved, clarified and settled.
Until then, we need to be cautious and consider LLMs to be extremely
problematic. Cleaning up after the fact, because of stripped copyright
and stripped attribution, will be a nightmare scenario for any
project. Better to be safe than sorry.
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