Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Give up GitHub: The time has come

sfconservancy.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 585 posts

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#371

Post by ordiel »

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…

If source its not subjet to corpyright then independently of it being illegaly leaked, i could unbrand XP's source code (that as I recall was leaked no long back) use it and redistribute it even for profit... I would like to see M$ answer to that.

I think the issue with Java's API was actually terribly explained even by Oracle's lawyers, Google stole that API, first because it already had a large amount of developers familiar with it so they could benefit of cheap code monkeys developing for their platform, added modifications (memory management) which under Java's open source licence (Oracle owns java yet it is still open source) they should have made public for everyone's benefit (in a true Open Source spirit), modified the packaging mechanism (slightly, you know .apk), so instead of you know having a package (jar) that can run on a desktop or rather on any JVM it could only run on the devices with their* OS (or rather dalvik implementation) and guess what, now that there are some options to run those on other environments the "casually" decided to change it again instead of letting people benefit from the rich APK ecosystem somewhere else than Android

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#372

Post by bmacho »

kertoip_1 wrote: post #21
lvncelot wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think many a junior just never initialized a repository, and 'git clone' is what they've used to "get a repository". So I would forgive them for thinking that a remote is needed for having a repository on their drive.

IMO the issue here is just that people think of git as it was something like SVN where you need to have some kind of external server to host project. Which isn't surprising as most of the time (when you cooperate with others) you do exactly that: push changes to one server. Idea of decentralization and independent copies of repositories may not be easy to grasp for newbe, because it's really technical concept.

IMO the "issue" that the concept of a free remote storage/backup makes sense, while doing random things on your own computer doesn't have much value for a lot of people.

".. you don't have to keep the previous versions, so it saves space? OK... No, I was talking about the real git."

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#373

Post by josephcsible »

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…

> Forcing your code to be open forever isn't freedom, it's the omission of freedom.

This isn't true. As an analogy, consider that forcing people to not own slaves isn't the omission of freedom. See also https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-power.en.html

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#374

Post by UncleEntity »

naikrovek wrote: post #338
bonzini wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!”

> 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!”

Nobody is forcing anyone to use the code.

If they chose to use it they have to abide by the licensing terms because that’s how it works. If the people laboring for free to produce this code don’t want it to be used in a proprietary application then tough luck, write the code yourself.

Every time the GPL comes up someone drags out this same old dead horse to beat on a little bit more.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#375

Post by ryanmcbride »

MacsHeadroom wrote: post #171
ryanmcbride wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I had to learn Assembly in college. We also had to physically print out our C++ code and turn it in to the professor. Did it make me a better programmer? Maybe but to this day I still haven't had to use it. Most of my practical skills I picked up on the job. P.S. I've seen the professor grading the printed out programs and he'd do it by flipping to the last page which was supposed to have the result output, and…

My C class had weekly written programming tests. Not multiple choice tests. We had to write a program by hand and hope to god it would compile without any errors. Horrible way to teach C imho.

Hey we had that too! Good ol pen and paper. It was thankfully generally for simple algorithms

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#376

Post by [deleted] »

ShamelessC wrote: post #294
inetknght wrote: post #150

Earlier 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…

[deleted]

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#377

Post by ryanmcbride »

corrral wrote: post #208
MacsHeadroom wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My C class had weekly written programming tests. Not multiple choice tests. We had to write a program by hand and hope to god it would compile without any errors. Horrible way to teach C imho.

If they also made you do all the calculations the program would, by hand, and record the output, then penalized you if you made any errors on that... it'd be math class.

When I had it it was primarily for logical problems. So it was more boolean logic than true math

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#378

Post by UmbertoNoEco »

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 love how you direct the question to the people putting their code out in their open and not to Microsoft. What is so special about Clippy et al?

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#379

Post by ryanmcbride »

lovich wrote: post #155
ryanmcbride wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I had to learn Assembly in college. We also had to physically print out our C++ code and turn it in to the professor. Did it make me a better programmer? Maybe but to this day I still haven't had to use it. Most of my practical skills I picked up on the job. P.S. I've seen the professor grading the printed out programs and he'd do it by flipping to the last page which was supposed to have the result output, and…

Did we go to the same school? Halfway through the semester he gave up on even that pretense and started throwing them out in front of us and giving everyone a C-

Never saw him do that but given his personality I wouldn't put it past him lol. He also cemented in me that there would be virtually no collaboration at a company and that we'd be given problems to solve/features to build and if we had trouble we'd get the can. I think most of his work experience might have been in a pretty hostile work environment. Or at least a good while before pair programming became the hot ticket item.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#380

Post by _ph_ »

ratww wrote: post #271
_ph_ wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until you make the slightest mistake and your work area gets into a state not covered by the cheat sheet. But of course, the standard recommendation seems to be just to remove the work area and check it out again :p

Well you can always for help from a co-worker more experienced with Git, or just search the internet for help. That could be a teaching moment.

Well, that proves the point that just having a cheat sheet isn't a complete solution. And unfortunately, I am the co-worker more experienced with Git :p. Well not quite, I have a co-worker who is roughly on my level and we keep helping each other and of course trying to google ourselves out of every corner we got us into.

The practical approach was to write a simple GUI which supports the operations "Pull" "Stage" "Commit" "Push", which makes live quite easy. And otherwise, try to keep out of anything more complex, until really neede. Works quite well, but I cannot say I am entirely happy. There are some benefits though, due to our company using a GitHub Enterprise installation for all version control. Ironically, our group recommended that some years ago, but because GitHub comes with a lot of neat features, less so because our love of git :)

And yes, over time, I am picking up more of it, but I try to do that on a slow pace, because I consider VC a tool which is important for work, but which shouldn't take time away from work. And Git definitely takes a lot of time to learn, there are far too many mechanics exposed to the end user.

Post reply on HN