We have been using GitHub for managing our free and open-source projects for quite a while. However, there were some concerns that we brushed off initially, until we couldn’t.

Building in the open in a proprietary platform

This was the major reason for our consideration to switch hosting providers. As a community developing free and open-source application for improving inclusion and accessibility, we did not want to build our projects in a proprietary platform and invite others to join it just to contribute to our projects. It would be a disgrace to the free software ecosystem.

GitHub Copilot

The acquisition of GitHub followed by lack of engineering excellence in favor of trends such as AI (ahem, Copilot), that serves nothing other than AI slop, was a slap in our face to wake up to reality.

Copilot makes it so easy to generate issues and PRs that only takes more time to review, only to find the issue never existed and the code doesn’t work.

Furthermore, the fact that the tool is trained on public data which involves copyleft code makes it not just unethical, but also something that could cause us a headache with copyleft violations.

One more major concern with LLM generated code is the inconsistency with design principles that makes an interface inaccessible for users with disabilities. This is something that we really don’t want, considering we are developing inclusive technologies.

We believe that sharpening our skills as technologists is important than staying surface-level by using AI, as real growth and satisfaction happens when one goes out of comfort zone under good mentorship.

This led us to develop our strict no-AI/no-LLM policy after taking inspiration from Zig Programming Language

Accessibility

Starting today, all of our projects will be active on https://codeberg.org/fossiaorg and GitHub will serve as a mirror for people who are looking for accessibility.

Codeberg still has some accessibility concerns that are yet to be addressed. I have been looking into the source code for improving accessibility as well for upstream contributions.

If you are contributing to improve accessibility of Forgejo (the platform that’s used by Codeberg) or donating to Codeberg e. V., it would be really great.