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Give up GitHub: The time has come

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Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#311

Post by JoshTriplett »

ShamelessC wrote: post #306
inetknght wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It doesn't hold for licenses like MIT, BSD, or Apache-2.0 either, all of which require giving credit. You personally might not care; many people do.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#312

Post by xtracto »

karamanolev wrote: post #221
pragmatic wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. * For…

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

This is hilarious. I recently got a new laptop that has window$ 11. After setting it up with a Non Microsoft email (which required some good fight), I tries to install some random app from the Microsoft store, but got a "something went wrong please try again" on the first screen.

It's pathetic. I haven't used Windows since Win 7 , which I basically installed for gaming. Seeing the latest version of the OS makes me feel sorry for them. That's why Apple with all their assholery is eating their lunch (on the flip side my wife just got a MBP m1 and I was pleasantly surprised that it has hdmi port, magsafe, several USBc ports. Apple seems going in the right direction.)

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#313

Post by [deleted] »

travisgriggs wrote: post #5

> 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…

[deleted]

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#315

Post by TheRealPomax »

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

The problem is that you can't tell whether you're looking at verbatim code or not. While you can tell when you're looking at "obviously verbatim" code, everything else could still be verbatim and license encumbered, so there is literally nothing you can use copilot for if your intent is to write new software.

But it gets worse: because you can't tell whether copilot is giving you illegal-to-use code, even just looking at its output can make you liable for future transgressions because seeing copilot code may expose you to license-encumbered code that you might now use as inspiration for new, non-copilot code. Even if you in good faith believe your new code is your own, the law does not agree with that assessment: if your code is similar to something license encumbered that you read in the past, even if you forget about it, you are now potentially in legal trouble.

Simply by using copilot at all, you're taking on a risk that is great enough to go "actually, I am not even going to try this thing".

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#316

Post by brabel »

teruakohatu wrote: post #147
brabel wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They wrote the whole thing in C?! Wow, I really admire people who can turn C into useful, complex projects... I was trying to write C the other day and holy shit, it's incredibly hard to write anything that involves more than a couple of files... it just has almost no abstractions and one small slip and you've got a segfault that terminates your program without trace :D I gave up very quickly and been learning Zig no…

> Wow, I really admire people who can turn C into useful, complex project If you use any open source operating systems a significant portion of software you interact with are C (kernel, shell, utilities, sqlite etc).

I'm well aware... but still, when I see new software written in C when there are so many languages available (which was not the case when Linus started writing Linux) it's amazing to me, both because they can actually do it (I definitely don't have the discipline to pull it off, spoiled too much by high level languages) and because they didn't just choose to use something easier like Go or even Java.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#317

Post by JoshTriplett »

imdsm wrote: post #166

> “a broader conversation [about the ethics of AI-assisted software] seemed unlikely to alter your [SFC's] stance, which is why we [GitHub] have not responded to your [SFC's] detailed questions” To be fair, there is a valid point here. If even one party has already made their conclusions and enters into a discussion with no willingness to even entertain ideas, instead just to fight their corner, then why would other…

It seems far more likely that GitHub isn't answering the questions because they don't have answers that support what they're doing.

The ask here isn't "don't ever use AI code assistance tools", the ask here is "don't ship something as an AI code assistance product that fails to provide any means of tracking provenance and handling license compliance".

Quoting the post:

> Meanwhile, the work of our committee continues to carefully study the general question of AI-assisted software development tools. One recent preliminary finding was that AI-assisted software development tools can be constructed in a way that by-default respects FOSS licenses. We will continue to support the committee as they explore that idea further, and, with their help, we are actively monitoring this novel area of research. While Microsoft's GitHub was the first mover in this area, by way of comparison, early reports suggest that Amazon's new CodeWhisperer system (also launched last week) seeks to provide proper attribution and licensing information for code suggestions.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#318

Post by seadan83 »

Uninen wrote: post #291
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!

I see your point. The disagreement I have is I would not at all consider copilot as putting MSFT into the evil empire category yet. While it was very unnerving for the ownership to change, MSFT has really had a pretty hands-off approach on Github.

I touched on it, but I still see this for-profit model as being compatible with FOSS. Specifically, make it free to FOSS so that those professional software developers then move to adopt the same platform at their private companies. There are lots of examples of for-profit companies that provide free-to-foss platforms.

For example, just considering code scanners, Codacy, CodeClimate, Snyk, LGTM, all used by this project and all have the same for-profit model (but free to FOSS). We also use 'install4j', which has the same free-for-foss model and is a for-profit company.

I think the heart of it is the argument that MSFT is going to expand that for-profit model and leverage data in a way that violates FOSS licenses? Is copilot an example of that? Should this all be taken to the extreme and declare that MSFT is the evil empire for this and by extension so is Github?

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#319

Post by ShamelessC »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #311
ShamelessC wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It doesn't hold for licenses like MIT, BSD, or Apache-2.0 either, all of which require giving credit. You personally might not care; many people do.

That's true. I use MIT myself (although I don't care if people cite me).

I guess this just all seems rather activist to me but people aren't seeing the big picture; our jobs as programmers are about to change in a very big way. It won't be long before more competition enters the space (e.g. Salesforce and Amazon) and ultimately it won't matter if this model saw some GPL/MIT code because the next one will work twice as well without having seen any of it.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#320

Post by naikrovek »

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.

I want to know what stuff you guys are putting in public GitHub FOSS repos that you don't want replicated in any way...

I also want to know why people think their code is so special that no one else could have ever come up with it independently. Each and every opponent of Copilot is the best developer ever, I guess?

That said, I don't understand the choice to use GPL for any reason, so maybe I'm not equipped to understand the arguments against Copilot. Forcing your code to be open forever isn't freedom, it's the omission of freedom. Someone using your (for example) MIT-licensed code in a closed-source commercial software project doesn't "un-free" the code you released; your code is still exactly as open and as available as it was before, and zero freedoms were lost by anyone.

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