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Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same

theregister.com

11–20 of 131 posts

Re: Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same

#11
post #9

Simply moving away from Github is not enough to protect your code if you see this as a problem. Moving your code away from Github to some open alternative doesn't stop Github consuming it to use in Copilot unless you specifically forbid that in your license. If you code is freely available to use for any purpose, as many open source licenses permit, then that includes using it as training data for a for-profit produc…

Or don't license your code at all. Gives you great power with selective enforcement of IP rights.

Re: Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same

#12
I remember back around 2011 I went to an Ionic framework meetup where they served pizza and soda.

After listening for hours about how they basically made a streamlined design system for any company to use freely, QA began. I raised my hand and when called upon I asked whether or not anyone in the room felt that the companies who would be using it actually deserved it.

The lead dev got flustered the room went quiet for a second before they moved on.

Feels like maybe people are beginning to wake up a bit, I hope.

Re: Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same

#13
post #2

What's a good alternative? Preferably not in the US, preferably not biased towards (or against) any political agenda.

Moving repos between hosts is trivial; e.g. I keep bare clones on my laptop, on an AWS server, and GitHub; with post-receive hooks that keep them all in sync.

GitHub's appeal is all the add-on functionality that's not actually stored in the git repo itself; e.g. Issues, Pull Requests, etc. That can't be migrated away easily.

Anyone who (a) has concerns about GitHub (monoculture, Microsoft, Copilot, whatever), and (b) relies on such add-on functionality, should look into moving that metadata into their repos. To give Microsoft some credit, GitHub Actions already does this (via YAML files in a .github/workflows folder)

For my personal projects, I use a simple program called Artemis to manage issues, which just stores maildir files in a hidden folder: http://www.chriswarbo.net/blog/2017-06-14-artemis.html

Re: Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same

#18

SFconservancy.org is a copyleft/GPL-aligned organization, so calling it an "Open Source" body is really not correct.

Journalists never get the details right. Never. This is one of the cases where we were able to notice how they are off.

Re: Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same

#19
post #6
post #2

What's a good alternative? Preferably not in the US, preferably not biased towards (or against) any political agenda.

https://codeberg.org/

This does not nearly rise to GitHub levels of badness, of course, but reading their ToS thread[1] leaves me with an icky feeling.

[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/18

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