I have no considered opinion on the GitHub thing in general, but Copilot depresses me. Any tool that makes you more productive at the cost of taking away the pleasure of figuring it out on your own bores and depresses me.
[deleted]
Give up GitHub: The time has come
301–310 of 585 posts
Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come
#302As 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?
Owned by microsoft no less
Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come
#303I find it very strange that the same HN crowd that loves open source and wouldn't touch anything proprietary with a 10 foot pole has so many reservations against moving off of GitHub. I am not generalizing here, just surprised. According to what I have seen in my short experience, HN should have ditched GitHub long since. Anyway... I have always been curious as to why the largest hosting for OSS isn't open source its…
As a strong Free Software supporter on HN that uses Github I'll take a shot.
I use Github to publicly host my projects. I use github as I want them as public as possible and that is where all the people are.. I.E. it has the lowest friction for others. The tradeoff is a bit of extra work on yourself to make sure you keep the 'git' part of your repo the central thing. Use the hosting as extras appropriately, but don't rely on them. All relevant context, reasoning, etc. needs to be in the git commit messages. The git repo should stand alone and tell the complete story.
IMO following this simple rule you can keep your project git repo whereever is easiest for the users without lockin. Github's added features over basic git hosting are decent but none of them are irreplaceable if you keep your repo up properly.
Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come
#304> 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.
[deleted]
Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 ti…
> 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.
That's fine if your project says that. But there are a very many of projects which specifically say otherwise.
Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 ti…
> 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. That's fine if your project says that. But there are a very many of projects which specifically say otherwise.
Right I'm just saying your argument only holds for licenses like GPL, not in general as you suggested.
edit: Not implying you're wrong, just moreso that there's a large chunk of people who aren't going to be motivated to fight on your behalf. I understand there are some useful areas such as hardware drivers for GPL, but it's simply not an IP constraint that sounds at all fun to work on as a volunteer.
Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You say BitBucket and Gitlab are alternatives, but at the same time you can not fathom the idea of migrating away from GitHub. So it's safe to say that GitHub has a de facto control of the market, much like Windows controlled the desktop market until early 2000's.
I can fathom a migration. It's just not pretty & is expensive. The experience coming out of source forge was not pleasant, and that was before the project even had a CI/CD. The early days of Github were game changers for FOSS, no more consolidating email patches together, etc.. So, this goes to whether Github still has a reputation and a brand for being a good home to FOSS. The argument that copilot, which automates what is otherwise an available and a manual process, and lifts just lines of code and small sections - is not at all "reproducing software". It's like someone used the "pad left" functionality from someones Javascript on their web page. Being able to do that is part of the point, it is a feature of openness, it's not a corporate back-door, market monopoly enabling flaw.
I'm curious if anyone can find references, though when I researched market share of code hosting companies a few years ago (for a private company that was moving off of BitBucket), it turned out that there were more private companies on Gitlab than Github. Github though had a big advantage for hosting FOSS. We wound up moving to Microsoft Azure because the scrum boards and Microsoft integration were appealing and familiar to the company. I don't see it being analagous as Windows desktop control in the early 2000's.
Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
> the Teams team didn't want to share their source at all for whatever reason
Because it probably mines one bitcoin block every time you click on something. No sane codebase could possibly be so abysmally slow.
Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come
#309As 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…
> 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…
> 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 incendiary but accurate to me)
Can you point me to those articles? I have seen the Quake thing, but "your project's code" is not like that one function in Quake (namely, it's not duplicated hundreds to thousands of times through countless license violations already).
Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come
#310You can either try and sway people purely philosophically as the software freedom conservancy is trying to do here, but I think ultimately in today's world, you need more, most of the time, you need to show that: - what you opposed negatively affects your target audience in real ways that matter, for their career, livelihood, or some other means - Show that continuing to be apart of an old model will be damaging in t…
GitHub has a formidable monopoly on source code hosting, thanks to network effects alone. I don't think there's a realistic case you can make today along the lines of your first bullet point that could convince a career-minded developer to switch away. Direct competition against GitHub is barely worth contemplating; the practical path I see for replacing GitHub must be more indirect: 1. Some nonprofit foundation spin…
Not so much that I am saying philosophical arguments are wrong, they need to be had and presented, in this case I even find myself inclined to agree with them in some respects.
Simply, I'm highlighting what I believe to be crucial in giving the philosophical argument some teeth in purpose and next steps.
If the friction cost is low to do the right thing, then doing the right thing becomes extremely palatable