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Give up GitHub: The time has come

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Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#291

Post by Uninen »

seadan83 wrote: post #176

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…

That list is a perfect example why GitHub is so problematic.

Forget Copilot. Even without that you’ve put all of those services in one centralized basket, fully controlled by a for-profit company (with proven track record of unethical behavior).

And not only that, but this is true for the vast majority of FOSS projects!

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#292

Post by sreevisakh »

blibble wrote: post #71

if you're worried about copilot: isn't the problem is that copyright law (apparently) allows them to do it? if you move everything to gitlab/self-hosted there's nothing stopping them spending 5 minutes querying the bing index and feeding it every repo they find

Copying off Github and copying off another host is not quite the same. I explained it twice on this thread already. So I'm leaving a link here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31937705

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#293

Post by jrm4 »

rmbyrro wrote: post #286
jrm4 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is absolutely a need for moral panic if, like me, you believe that code and industry quality of product is more important than onboarding more people into the profession. I can't think of a worse idea than subconsciously letting the idea "By default, the way we are supposed store and write code is by putting it in the hands of a deeply centralized third party that will exploit you and owes you nothing" just sor…

> you believe that code and industry quality of product is more important than onboarding more people into the profession Perhaps a bit of a stretch? Does the fact that new devs don't know Git fully necessarily mean the quality of code will decrease? I mean, compared with the new devs knowing Git fully...

I mean something broader than that here; I mean to say that "a generation of new devs who grow up in a world that sees git and Github as equivalent is perhaps likely to be something like a not-useful generation of mindless code drones doing little more than working for the proverbial 'man'" -- which, especially for CODING (in which hours doesn't mean accomplishment, unlike, say dentistry) simply isn't good for the world.

There's some conflating of correlation and causation here, of course.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#294

Post by ShamelessC »

inetknght wrote: post #150
i_like_apis wrote: post #126

I disagree with all of their reasons for disliking GitHub. * They make money from Co-Pilot? Great! * They sell software to ICE? Good. Why wouldn’t they? I’m not interested in anti-immigration-enforcement politics. * They’re a closed-source for-profit company? Great! That’s why their product is high quality.

> They make money from Co-Pilot? Great! OK let me take your projects and make money from them and not give you anything in return, not even credit. > They sell software to ICE? Good. Why wouldn’t they? I’m not interested in anti-immigration-enforcement politics. ICE policies aside, you should be interested in immigration politics because they're important to people and businesses. Apathy is a bad thing here. > They’r…

> OK let me take your projects and make money from them and not give you anything in return, not even credit.

This is one hundred percent okay with me and many other open source contributors. It's a no-strings-attached donation to mankind, and if someone else finds value in it, you don't complain, you cheer. Who needs attribution when people are actually _using_ something you made; you saved someone a good deal of time trying to write a solution themselves, perhaps.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#295

Post by ShamelessC »

skybrian wrote: post #73
happymellon wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main point is that it's a commercial service that doesn't respect other people's licences. Previously it was free and the noises that GitHub had given made it sound like it wasn't finished. Turns out it was.

It seems like a legal grey area because for the most part what CoPilot is doing seems like it should be a transformative use [1] and you don't need a license for that. But apparently sometimes CoPilot will spit out other people's code verbatim, so I wouldn't use it. Not worth the risk. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use

It actually has an option that searches GitHub for collisions and rejects any matches from showing.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#296

Post by 10x-dev »

SftwrSvior81 wrote: post #172
10x-dev wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is objectively not ludicrous. It might go against the commonly taught idea that businesses should focus solely on generating profits, but it is not unreasonable to create a system where businesses have to keep the common good in mind. There is a difference between 'how things are now' and 'how things could be'. Imagining and wanting a different status quo is not by itself ludicrous (especially since we all stand t…

It's not just a "commonly taught idea that businesses should focus solely on generating profit", it's the fundamental principle upon which economies are built today almost anywhere in the world. Sure, there are other ways of organizing economic systems, but to suggest that we are simply or easily going to switch to one is unrealistic. Imagining and wanting a different status quo will not lead to a different status qu…

I did not suggest it would be easy and also, someone has to imagine a competitor company before it can exist.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#297

Post by ballenf »

pragmatic wrote: post #217
josephcsible wrote: post #173

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.

You haven't had root admin on Windows since Windows 7.

The telemetry makes this clear. Reboots and updates even more so.

The UI lag and stealing of focus ("oh, you're typing a document... too bad, I want to launch a new Explorer window that will immediately steal focus") make it clear that the computer is in charge and will probably listen to your requests, but on the timeline it chooses.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#298

Post by popinman322 »

wilde wrote: post #156
josephcsible wrote: post #122

> 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.

The boring answer is probably something along the lines of “copilot was trained by employees of OpenAI who aren’t technically MS employees”. When I worked at MS you had to jump through all sorts of hoops to get access to code from other orgs. I can’t imagine what BS you’d need to do to give access to a vendor.

At least a year ago in Azure that wasn't true; everyone had access to nearly every internal service's code (+the windows kernel). Though there were some exceptions (the Teams team didn't want to share their source at all for whatever reason).

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#299

Post by bayindirh »

seadan83 wrote: post #278
quadrifoliate wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a leader of a FOSS project that is on github...Do I have that reasoning correct? The way I read the article was that by being on GitHub, you are implicitly agreeing to no longer be a FOSS project as regards licensing. GitHub customers can use Copilot to generate proprietary code that's identical to your project's code (several articles I have read call this overall idea "laundering through Copilot", which sounds…

Piling on: Is copilot really a violation of GPLv3 (our license)? How is co-pilot different from someone lifting sections of code? Lifting a few sections of the code is a world different compared to re-distributing the entirety of the source code, or forking the project and replacing 2 or 3 letters from our brand name & then redistributing that. I think the article needed to go into more detail about how that really i…

> Is copilot really a violation of GPLv3 (our license)? How is co-pilot different from someone lifting sections of code? Lifting a few sections of the code is a world different compared to re-distributing the entirety of the source code, or forking the project and replacing 2 or 3 letters from our brand name & then redistributing that.

Yes. Many projects will see your license and never copy your code if their licenses is incompatible with yours. Copilot disregards your license and offers your code or derivations of it to anyone who asks the correct questions, breaching your license both in ethical and legal level.

You can't lift a function from a GPL licensed codebase and plant it to a MIT licensed codebase. It's that simple.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#300

Post by bayindirh »

seadan83 wrote: post #226
rglullis wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Tha…

GitLab, with its runners is a more than a decent alternative, which you can also host yourself, with really minimal effort.
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