[frontalier]

GH could be doing more but they are also hosting open source, and closed source, repositories for free.

[omnimus]

Not exactly for free nowdays since they teach their AIs on the repos.

[vasdae]

Yes, that's still exactly for free.

[bee_rider]

Free doesn’t seem like a great name for situations in which profit is extracted from a user in a sort of nebulous fashion.

[somsak2]

you could say the same thing about ad based businesses. how else is the company supposed to cover its costs if it has a free service?

[bee_rider]

They aren’t free, they are ad funded. You pay for the service by viewing the ads.

The only organizations that provide free services are, like, donation driven charities. Or hobbyist groups.

Maybe somebody could argue for government funded organizations, but I don’t want to get into that whole can of worms.

[musha68k]

Yes, perfect training grounds for your future “solo-pilot coding agent”.

Let’s not kid ourselves, by now we know that data is gold and we hand it to these corporations without ever getting paid for it.

One of the main reasons they can “incur losses” on co-pilot is not only future monopolization by market share but also by being provided endless amounts of golden data through usage.

So yes, hosting “social git” with some fancy UI and CI and spinning up GPUs (they will constantly need to ramp up on anyways) is peanuts in comparison to the upside.

Yes, open source developers as well as co-pilot users should get paid for their labour. Directly and by MSFT.