The AlekSIS® School Information System does not use GitHub for development.
tl;dr: You can find the AlekSIS development resources on EduGit.
The GitHub platform is a commercial, closed product leveraging many free software tools. But GitHub itself is not free software (noone can read or improve its code).
Microsoft, the operators of GitHub, have their reasons for not open-sourcing GitHub: They use it to harvest virtually unlimited amounts of code that they can re-use. It is not proved for the greater good, but for Microsoft's profit.
GitHub's Terms of Service define who can use GitHub and who not.
These terms, for various reasons, contain some exclusions. GitHub cannot be used by many people if they meet certain criteria, among which are age and origin.
The reason is that GitHub is a commercial platform, and therefore it is regulated by many US American laws, such as COPPA or export regulations.
If you are a user or contributor who is younger than 13 years, or younger than 16 years in some parts of the world, or you happen to live in a country that the US Trade Administration does not like, you are exlucded.
Imagine you are a young, skilled hacker who wants to contribute to the software running at your school, but the project uses GitHub. So you have to wait until you are old enough, even though you do have the skills now. Or imagine that, at the time of writing, you are living in Russia. You probably are a friendly and liberal person, and probably you don't agree with your government's actions in Ukraine. Yet, because your government is at a self-declared war against Ukraine and its allies, you are now excluded from contributing to your favourite project.
Microsoft could change its policies by properly separating its commercial interests from their free software hosting activities. AlekSIS' founding organisation, Teckids, has been in contact with Microsoft's legal and marketing departments. They agree that the solutions would be simple, but that they don't want them.
AlekSIS is supposed to be a platform for learning in every regard – it helps organise learning, but it also can be a tool for learning itself. We do not exclude anyone depending on their age or origin.
With GitHub Copilot, GitHub as effectively declared that they will ignore the licenses of code hosted on GitHub. The FSF has published a colelction of whitepapers concerning this.
We want our code to be open, and we want users and developers to abite by our licensing terms. Therefore, we have now also removed our public read-only mirror from GitHub.
We encourage every project to leave GitHub.
If you are an educational project or education is a core goal of your project, you are welcom on EduGit as well.
If you are looking for a more general solution, you can try the excellent Codeberg platform.
