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Give up GitHub: The time has come

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Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#431

Post by hinkley »

UmbertoNoEco wrote: post #378
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…

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?

Skipped right over the question on the table and asked a whole bunch of passive aggressive questions.

Truly a classic.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#432

Post by warkdarrior »

notriddle wrote: post #362
s0l1dsnak3123 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is a design flaw that cannot be fixed without breaking the API: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190528-00/?p=10... I'm pretty sure there are a lot of those.

Apparently nobody at Microsoft thought about the Windows registry as a database, which of course needs indexing to be performant.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#433

Post by galleywest200 »

smt88 wrote: post #419
isodev wrote: post #168

What Microsoft is doing with GitHub is gross. Like VSCode, it’s an example of exploiting our natural affinity towards convenience to lock ever-growing parts of the developer community to their services. There are great FOSS tools for hosting source code like https://gitea.io/en-us/ and https://codeberg.org/ . I’d put the work to self-host and even contribute to any of them.

> Like VSCode, it’s an example of exploiting our natural affinity towards convenience... This makes no sense. Our GitHub lock-in is due to the audience. If a FOSS project leaves, they lose the GitHub audience. It's a social network. VSCode is absolutely nothing like that. You seem to be condemning Microsoft for making a really good product. Is JetBrains also evil for their suite of amazing, convenient products?

I had thought that JetBrains products requires a licence, unlike VSCode which is free in regards to monetary cost.

However - the main gripe this community has with VSCode is that it is only partially open source. Microsoft adds extra bits to the code that is not open - mainly the items around telemetry. You can get around this with VSCodium or VSCode-OSS, but those are arguably forks and not a MS product.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#434

Post by nojito »

ssddanbrown wrote: post #331
nojito wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There's no difference. Freedom is freedom. Adding qualifications to it inherently makes it less free.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#435

Post by mr_toad »

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…

> Someone using your (for example) MIT-licensed code in a closed-source commercial software project doesn't "un-free" the code

It’s the users of that closed-source commercial software that lose freedoms.

How many times does it have to be stated? GPL is for the users.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#436

Post by mr_toad »

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.

> why are your Microsoft Windows and Office codebases not in your training set? This is my favorite question about Copilot ever.

While GitHub might have a license to use that code to train the model, it’s debatable what license applies to the output of the model, and what users of the model can do with it.

It’s possible for an AI to reproduce something so close to the original that it would be considered an infringement on the original work.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#437

Post by smt88 »

galleywest200 wrote: post #433
smt88 wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like VSCode, it’s an example of exploiting our natural affinity towards convenience... This makes no sense. Our GitHub lock-in is due to the audience. If a FOSS project leaves, they lose the GitHub audience. It's a social network. VSCode is absolutely nothing like that. You seem to be condemning Microsoft for making a really good product. Is JetBrains also evil for their suite of amazing, convenient products?

I had thought that JetBrains products requires a licence, unlike VSCode which is free in regards to monetary cost. However - the main gripe this community has with VSCode is that it is only partially open source. Microsoft adds extra bits to the code that is not open - mainly the items around telemetry. You can get around this with VSCodium or VSCode-OSS, but those are arguably forks and not a MS product.

I still don't understand why that's an issue. VSCode is a proprietary product. There are tons of FOSS alternatives if it doesn't work for someone or the telemetry is a problem.

My criticism would only be that the telemetry is not obvious enough for a casual downloader. I don't use VSCode but I'm sure a lot of people do without knowing about it.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#438

Post by yucky »

natefinch wrote: post #382
biztos wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> their code is so special that no one else could have ever come up with it independently I'm worried about exactly the opposite: having Copilot help me write code that seems quite generic to me, but which in fact makes my code subject to a license I don't even know about, and/or simply violates copyright. For an open-source project this could be embarrassing but probably fixable. It gets more complicated if FAANG is…

There's a setting on GitHub that blocks any suggestions that exactly match code in the training set. I doubt you'd ever get in trouble for code that was similar in structure but different variables etc from existing licensed code (especially since most small snippets of code are not terribly unique to begin with).

It does sound like the value of code creators is going to soon see significant downward pressure.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#439

Post by natefinch »

biztos wrote: post #401
natefinch wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a setting on GitHub that blocks any suggestions that exactly match code in the training set. I doubt you'd ever get in trouble for code that was similar in structure but different variables etc from existing licensed code (especially since most small snippets of code are not terribly unique to begin with).

AFAIK that's not enough, for instance see the long-standing industry practice that people working on the Important Stuff are not allowed to ever look at the source code of the Direct Competitor; or clean-room reverse engineering, etc. I guess time will tell how much acquiring companies (my worry) care about Copilot. Given the difficulty hiring good devs, and the productivity level of body-shop devs, I see it getting…

There's a big difference between reverse engineering (i.e. intentionally writing software that behaves identically to another piece of software), and writing your own code to solve your own problem that may superficially contain small portions of the similar logic as some other project. Copyrighted code has to be sufficiently creative and unique to qualify, otherwise after the first person wrote code to parse json from a web request, no one else would be able to do the same thing.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#440

Post by natefinch »

yucky wrote: post #438
natefinch wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a setting on GitHub that blocks any suggestions that exactly match code in the training set. I doubt you'd ever get in trouble for code that was similar in structure but different variables etc from existing licensed code (especially since most small snippets of code are not terribly unique to begin with).

It does sound like the value of code creators is going to soon see significant downward pressure.

I'm sure that's what people said when they went from punch cards to assembly, and from assembly to C, and from C to Java.... and yet, here we are. Tools that let us write higher level code faster, just allow us to create more complicated software in a reasonable amount of time.
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