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Give up GitHub: The time has come

sfconservancy.org

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Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#331

Post by ssddanbrown »

nojito wrote: post #322
naikrovek wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 under…

GPL is one of the least free licenses out there.

Freedom of the code to its users vs Freedom of the users of the code

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#332

Post by JoshTriplett »

uberman wrote: post #3

The impetus for the post is apparently "co-pilot" being a commercial service. I have no dog in this fight, just giving an overview of their main argument.

They have a variety of good reasons at https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/ , not just Copilot.

Another critical reason is that GitHub is proprietary and has a pile of services with lock-in that (unlike git) aren't easy to move elsewhere. Some people depend on GitHub for their livelihood (through GitHub Sponsors). Some people's software integrates tightly with GitHub bots, or Actions, or issues, or project management. Everything other than the code itself is incredibly difficult to port over to another service.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#333

Post by natefinch »

rglullis wrote: post #214
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…

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?

I think it's like any social network. It grows in value with how many people use it. Yes, you can host your own public git repo or even your own gitlab, but then there's a barrier of entry to contribute to your code, and it's a lot harder for others to discover it.

disclosure: I work for github

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#334

Post by natefinch »

cybrox wrote: post #51
parentheses wrote: post #43

GitHub is a business and currently provides free storage and a pretty nice interface to it. It’s easy to say “our rights are being stripped away” but the view that businesses should operate like non profits or government services with the common good in mind is ludicrous!

These are the immediate "products" GitHub provides, however, I would argue it provides a lot more. GitHub provides a place for people to easily collaborate on FOSS software. It has helped millions of people getting into software development or into their first FOSS project by lowering the barrier of entry significantly. Can you imagine how many people would start contributing to FOSS early in their career if they had…

I definitely never contributed to open source before github was around.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#335

Post by doodlesdev »

nakovet wrote: post #326

Nobody mentions User Experience. SourceForge was terrible, Google Code also, Gitlab has an acceptable UX. Github kills it in most fronts. What prevents Github Copilot from expanding to FOSS that is not hosted by them in the future? Just how Google indexes and caches the whole internet, what prevents this thing from going to public gitea of FOSS projects and scraping to train their model!? I love Copilot, will pay for…

When you join GitHub you accept their ToS which among many things gives them the rights to use your code for stuff like Copilot. Theoretically (although I'm not sure of this is the case, looks like no one does right now) Microsoft would have to change the way they handle code licenses in their training set if they were to use code hosted elsewhere, giving attribution to code from MIT licenses and not using AGPL code at all.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#336

Post by bayindirh »

seadan83 wrote: post #324
bayindirh wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 license…

I appreciate the response. The ethical level, in my opinion, is reproducing the functioning software and the "business" specific logic. At a specific function level, and particularly for boilerplate code, I don't view that as specific to this (GPLv3 licensed FOSS) project. There are also dozens more examples of the same code being used, I don't think FOSS necessary gets a monopoly on technology. Which I think creates…

You're welcome. First of all thanks for your kind and welcoming response.

It's an interesting debate for sure. When a program is divided into many functions, and when there are many utility functions, the debate indeed gets blurry. Moreover, many of the open projects in today's world are web applications and "simple" in nature.

In this context, simple means that the application can be composed via many simple, relatively general functions with a unique asset set and unique way of connecting them, so the magic (or sauce if you pardon the term) gets more abstract.

On the other hand, we have another group of programs, which can be similarly called "complex" programs. The biggest difference is these programs use complex, one of a kind functions.

Consider Blender, KiCAD, many open source and GPL licensed scientific software, libraries like Eigen, video/audio encoders, CD/DVD tools. Even a three liner in these programs and libraries can be a game changer.

I have a research oriented code, and a ~25 line function in this is worthy of its paper. I published a paper, and didn't obfuscate the language and algorithm, so you can implement it if you want.

However, if I open the code of this algorithm with AGPL3, can you say it's too small to be licensed? I don't think so. A more general algorithm can be ruled out as "too simple", but "fast_inverse_square_root" or my function or any other math heavy secret sauce can't be excluded because it's 2-3 lines.

As a result, while this issue needs serious discussion, we need to understand that even a small piece of code can carry a lot of research, knowledge and advantage in itself, regardless of its size.

So, while lifting a left pad from a GPL code can be understandable up to a certain point, getting the secret sauce, improving it and keeping it closed or merging into a similar, but incompatibly licensed software is inexcusable.

At the end of the day, this means we need to defend our GPL codebases, because we can't protect our secret sauce functions without defending the simpler ones.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#337

Post by JoshTriplett »

ShamelessC wrote: post #319
JoshTriplett wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

People are seeing the big picture. That's all the more reason to make sure that, as new tools get developed, they treat it as a requirement to actually respect Open Source (licensing, credit, provenance, copyleft, patent non-aggression, and all the other reasons people use such licenses), rather than just abusing it as an input.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#338

Post by naikrovek »

bonzini wrote: post #330
naikrovek wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 under…

Forcing your code to be open forever is guaranteeing freedom of all users of my code, both direct and indirect. Developers don't need to have any more freedoms than other users.

> Forcing your code to be open forever is guaranteeing freedom of all users of [your] code

No, that’s forcing restriction on all users of your code.

Usage restriction is the opposite of freedom…

Forcing all of your code to be GPL is like saying “I am on a diet, so now I will force everyone else be on the same diet. Freedom!”

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#339

Post by ordiel »

When Github anounced its impending acquisition by Microsoft unlike many others who just flooded gitlab, I took it as a sign to just go ahead and host my personal git repo. Sure it takes some more effort and it "hurts my pocket" yet.... hosting a git repository on a raspberry pi costs no much more than having a lightbulb on permanently and having a cron job to back it up and save it somewhere once a month its not too much maintainance, my code is as free and/or private as I want it to be now and I actually think I gain so much more control of what I get to do with it instead of being limited to be a hostage of making my code opensource in order to get full feature capabilities.

And no, I have not switched (yet) to a non propietary git system, I am using Bitbucket (yes on a Raspberry PI) since it has plenty of already built in integrations, sadly they ended their offer of self hosted for small teams. It used to cost 10 bucks to get a licence to host your server for 10 users... lord most OSS is a lone effort or surelly under 10 guys, i am sure they would have continued that offer given they had more small customers. Anyhow there are plenty good alternatives as Gitea that someone might use, and that would be the true intent of git as a decentralized platform... nontheless while software is one of the best paid professions nowdays it is full of cheap (greedy) people

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#340

Post by mappu »

NoGravitas wrote: post #47

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…

A possible middle ground here is to allow GitHub OAuth2 logins to your Gitea instance - then at least GitHub users can join in your project without too much friction.
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