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Give up GitHub: The time has come

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221–230 of 585 posts

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reasons that Windows is awful have nothing to do with code quality. Windows is awful because of intentional choices Microsoft made (e.g., bloatware that gets reinstalled with every update, mandatory Microsoft accounts, and mandatory telemetry).

In what way is Windows “awful”? I can think of annoyances but awful? Come on.

They explicitly listed the reasons they think it's awful. My personal grievances with Windows align more or less with theirs and while I wouldn't go as far as to say it's awful, I'd use something certainly stronger than "annoyance".

Specifically, clear anti-user choices that exceed by far being "annoying":

* Making it exceedingly difficult or impossible to use the OS without logging in with a Microsoft account.

* Forcing the user in various ways to surrender data to Microsoft. Some of them can be disabled if you really go out of your way, others can't.

* Prompting me again and again to switch to Edge and other MS defaults. I've had the same install for a few years now and NO, I don't want to change to "Microsoft recommended defaults", no matter how many times you ask me.

* Showing the same "OS setup" screen after some updates, requiring me to pay very close attention to what I'm clicking, lest I select something MS is trying to lead me to. The amount of attention required from the user on those screens corresponds quite well with anti-user behavior.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#222

> If it is, as you claim, permissible to train the model (and allow users to generate code based on that model) on any code whatsoever and not be bound by any licensing terms, why did you choose to only train Copilot's model on FOSS? For example, why are your Microsoft Windows and Office codebases not in your training set? This is my favorite question about Copilot ever.

According to their logic, if I train a model using stolen Windows source code, it's fair use.

Just because they use FLOSS licenses, does not allow them to evade things like Affero GPL3. And, to that end, if they are using Affero, I want the source to the whole copilot infrastructure -or- proof they used no AGPL3 code anywhere.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#223
Look, I agree that copilot feels slimy. However, honest question: if you're maintaining an open source project, in most cases I'd say your source is publicly available somewhere. What realistically prevents github from doing exactly what it did with code that isn't even hosted on it? What, with regards to copilot, is changed by moving one's code off of github to some other public site?

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#224

> For its part, Git was designed specifically to make software development distributed without a centralized site. Just yesterday I had to explain the basic premise/history of Git to a young intern. I had asked him if he was using Git to manage his little pet project the company gave him to play with. “No”, he replied, he didn’t know what the company’s policy was to posting code in public on GitHub. As I explained to…

That scenario plays itself out time and time again. 1. Base technology arrives and is adopted en masse 2. Some entity wraps it in an easier-to-use interface 3. After some time, that interface becomes the de facto standard 4. Developers who started developing after #2 and especially #3 don't understand how the underlying technology works or even that the wrapper is just a wrapper I'm reminded of how many Juniors I tra…

Is the takeaway here, then, to beat third parties to the punch when creating a new technology and include a first-party easy-to-use interface right out of the gate?

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#225

> For its part, Git was designed specifically to make software development distributed without a centralized site. Just yesterday I had to explain the basic premise/history of Git to a young intern. I had asked him if he was using Git to manage his little pet project the company gave him to play with. “No”, he replied, he didn’t know what the company’s policy was to posting code in public on GitHub. As I explained to…

It can be disheartening to see but personally as a young developer it also provides proof I have skills beyond them.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#226

As a leader of a FOSS project that is on github, and migrated off of sourceforge because SVN and email patches were not scaling - I'm a bit confused by this article. Co-pilot has issues, ergo github is going the way of sourceforge, and so now we must abandon github? Do I have that reasoning correct? We need to: - migrate the bug queue - have all links in commit history break - application integration with githib for…

Forget Copilot for a second. Do you think it is healthy for the industry to be so dependent on one single service provider, and a closed one on top of that?

There is gitlab, a decent alternative. Bitbucket is a (poor) option too. I think I would quibble with that dependency statement. Github is providing a lot of services, high availability, project tracking, a web api, etc...

The money model, as is for many free to FOSS tools is that by getting devs tooo use those tools, they'll carry forward to their professional lives and recommend the adoption by their companies. That does happen in practice, so it seems like the money model will not necessarily flip like it did for sourceforge (which kinda was garbage and the only game in town)

I would disagree about the industry dependency compared to FOSS. Many companies are not on github

So, that is to say the dependency aspect is a concern. So far Microsoft has overall been a steward for FOSS and copilot is not at all nearly enough to lose that trust. It is always a bit nerve wracking to place your balls in someone else's hands... and it was concerning when MSFT bought github.. but they have not been evil, not even close yet (in the grand picture)

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#227
post #186
post #134

This isn't very compelling to me. SourceForge went bad ... and everyone left. That doesn't seem like a bad thing and there's no reason for me to think any given site / service will or won't go bad too. I expect that for any number of reasons I might need to move from one site to the next. The rest too is kinda hollow to me. The fact that they're for profit doesn't upset me. I figured they wanted to make a profit when…

It's been years, but as I remember it SourceForge's primary downfall was the bundling of malware with binaries. That's why people I know stopped using it completely rather than because it was run on a proprietary platform.

Also the UI sucked. I never looked forward to using it.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#228
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying the FSF accepted github's terms of service when someone mirrored Emacs into github?

You mean when a maintainer of Emacs setup the mirror? https://sachachua.com/blog/2015/12/2015-12-10-emacs-chat-joh...

Of course in this case as well, it even says that mirror is not endorsed by the copyright owner.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#229
post #223

Look, I agree that copilot feels slimy. However, honest question: if you're maintaining an open source project, in most cases I'd say your source is publicly available somewhere. What realistically prevents github from doing exactly what it did with code that isn't even hosted on it? What, with regards to copilot, is changed by moving one's code off of github to some other public site?

Rate limiting Microsoft's ability to exploit FOSS, and moving to platforms that won't/can't implement abusive practices that cause these kinds of mass exoduses in the first place.

I think if Microsoft was figuratively and literally rate limited from accessing such a huge swath of open source code, they might not have been the ones to build something like Copilot and we may have been better off for it. A different, more ethical team might have made something better. Maybe it would even be an open source project.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#230
post #104

I publish my public FOSS work on a self-hosted Gitea. I don't allow account creation, and people can send me pull requests by email. That said, I think one thing (other than interface and brand loyalty) that keeps FOSS projects on GitHub is network effects. You can reasonably expect to search it and find the projects you're looking for, and your account lets you use the issue tracker and pull requests on other projec…

Gitea (and a few others) are working on federation for pull requests, which would allow someone to fork your project to their own server, and send a pull request offering you to merge from their server into yours. It also builds on top of ActivityPub which is supposed to allow federation with the greater ActivityPub ecosystem ("fediverse"). I guess this would allow people to like or comment your issue or pull request…

Why is gitea hosted on GitHub? That seems ironic.
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