Give up GitHub: The time has come • Hacker News Board

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#351

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 9:53 PM UTC

naikrovek wrote: post #320

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 under…

[deleted]

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#352

Post by flurdy » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 9:54 PM UTC

shrimpx wrote: post #227

bink wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes the UI turned into a car crash. So many ads, and restrictions.

Also they kept changing the services they offered to projects so often I gave up on that as well.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#353

Post by JoshTriplett » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 9:54 PM UTC

naikrovek wrote: post #320

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 under…

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

Please feel free to use my code in any way that its license permits: attribution for the permissive licenses, share-and-share-alike for the copyleft licenses. Those license terms are the price of the code, no different from a proprietary product's "this costs $x" or "this costs $x/month". I'm happy to give away most of what I work on every day, and I ask that people 1) give credit, and 2) in some cases, share under the same terms, and 3) in many cases, don't sue me or other users of code I've written over software patents (which shouldn't exist).

If the day comes that copyright goes away, and we can freely copy and share the code of any currently proprietary software and other works, I'd celebrate that. Until then, I don't want an asymmetric situation in which proprietary licenses must be adhered to but Open Source licenses are ignored.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#354

Post by s0l1dsnak3123 » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 9:55 PM UTC

zelphirkalt wrote: post #270

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).

Whenever I have to start windows 10, I still see the same kind of bugs, that were present on XP. One example: They seem to be simply unable to fix the icons "near the clock", which are still shown, when some app has been killed, until you hover over them. Things like that, but of course also lots of stuff that affects people more in form of annoyances, making every action take at least twice as long as on GNU/Linux d…

One similarly ignored bug that springs to mind is the performance of the "Send To" context menu item in File Explorer. I always dreaded dragging my mouse over it by accident.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#355

Post by nickjj » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 9:56 PM UTC

doodlesdev wrote: post #335

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…

> When you join GitHub you accept their ToS which among many things gives them the rights to use your code for stuff like Copilot.

I get so many "our terms of service changed" emails and they link to a 30+ page document with not even a diff of what changed. I vaguely remember GitHub sending one out maybe in December 2019 but it linked directly to https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t... and didn't even hint what was different so the only way you'd be able to know what changed is by re-reading every single word.

This is one of those things where you technically agree by continuing to use their service but no one can realistically be expected to read a 30+ page document for the 20 services they do every time a provider updates their terms without a diff. You'd be reading one of these at least once a week.

The email I got from GitHub also didn't include "pilot" anywhere in the body of the email and neither do their current terms of service, so now you need to be able to decipher whatever wording they use to translate back to "co-pilot". After all that I also have lots of emails from noreply@github.com and searching my inbox for emails from that with "terms" in the subject doesn't show anything related to co-pilot.

I'm not a lawyer but I can't imagine if you agree to the terms today but 3 months from now new terms have been added -- you don't passively start accepting those terms without an explicit action to say you do after you've been notified of the changes.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#356

Post by ordiel » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 9:57 PM UTC

westoncb wrote: post #284

devwastaken wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 11 is an example of poor code quality. Bugs everywhere, while the same things work on Ubuntu/popos. Past MS engineers have been commenting for a decade on how MS has grown too big, can't manage, and has become a monolith "too big to fail". By nature when engineers are small pieces of a giant machine, they don't do their best work. And those with the experience move on to better things.

My experience has also been that Windows 11 is buggy (haven't been using it for a while because it can't even reliably connect to the internet). But also in my limited experience (just one install on a single machine in ~2020, used for a few months): Ubuntu is just as bad or even worse.

Your experience its quite limited and you probably need to know how to properly update ubuntu since most of the issues I've found with it (since I started using it ~12 years ago) are usually issues caused by lack of drivers (which gets solved in 15 minutes once you know where to click) once those are solved it is sturdy and you can keep it runing for several months without having to restart it or it becoming unusably slow as it hapens with windows systems after about 4 days of uptime

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#357

Post by jrochkind1 » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 9:59 PM UTC

bayindirh wrote: post #300

seadan83 wrote: post #226

Earlier 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…

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

The last thing I want to do is host it myself.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#358

Post by systemz » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 10:03 PM UTC

shrimpx wrote: post #230

remram wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's getting close to be hosted by gitea: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1029

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#359

Post by rglullis » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 10:03 PM UTC

natefinch wrote: post #333

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?

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

The network grows in value with the size of the protocol, not just with a platform. Social networks can and should operate like email, not like siloed platforms. All the value ends up being captured and controlled by one single entity.

(I will not get in a tangent about web3, but that is the one thing that web3 skeptics always fail to acknowledge is how the current web is broken in that regard. We were promised open protocols, and we end up with a handful of companies building their own walled gardens)

The only way that Github would get any modicum of credibility would be if they joined the effort from codeberg/forgefed and integrated with activitypub. As it is now, github will be nothing but a mirror for my repositories that I will be hosting on gitlab and/or my own gitea.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#360

Post by jrochkind1 » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 10:04 PM UTC

sreevisakh wrote: post #256

remram wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I am not that excited about that last part, but federating pull requests sounds like a killer feature Git already has a pull request feature [1] that's as federated as it can get. The 'request-pull' command can be used to request pull on upstream repositories hosted anywhere (or not at all). The only requirement is that the downstream clone must be online. I know that HN isn't particularly found of email-based work…

> I know that HN isn't particularly found of email-based workflows for git.

I would think it's not just HN. Do you think people are using github PR feature because they just don't know about the email-based workflow available, but would prefer it if they did? Most people don't want an email-based workflow here.