The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), a non-profit focused on free and open source software (FOSS), recently wrote a blog post announcing a campaign to encourage OSS projects to “Give Up GitHub” [1]. A variety of well-known online publications reported on this campaign [2][3][4], which comes as the result of several factors: GitHub’s acquisition by Microsoft, controversial business dealings [5], the incongruity between supporting OSS and being a for-profit company built on proprietary codebases, and now, most recently, the announcement that they will start charging for Copilot — GitHub's GPT-3 AI pair programmer service. This latest news went down particularly badly amongst OSS developers who, rightly seeing that they played a crucial role in creating this service — by creating the training data for it — did not respond well to the news that GitHub would start charging them for it.
This campaign marks a significant turning point in user sentiment towards GitHub, and developers across the OSS community have been expressing an appetite for a self-sovereign alternative for code collaboration, with discussions on this topic springing up on forums and discussion groups [6][7]. The response to this issue is largely based on the principles of the Free Software Movement [8] which, for obvious reasons, is very well represented among OSS developers. The OSS community is large, however, and some subcultures of the OSS community express stronger views on this than others.
This document aims to make sense of what this means for Radicle. We will identify the different sub-cultures and OSS projects that have expressed particularly strong views on this subject and connect to developers from within these communities. From this, we will investigate how these users view Radicle, discover any concerns they have, understand their needs and requirements, and figure out where Radicle currently falls short on being a viable solution for them.