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Give up GitHub: The time has come

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Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#481

Post by cobbzilla »

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!”

This is a terrible analogy. Here’s a better one: I’m holding a potluck. If you decide to come, you can eat all you want. If you take food from my event, you can’t hoard it, you must share it, even if you’ve “made it better” by changing it somehow after you left.

Don’t like my rules? OK, don’t come to my potluck.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#482

Post by entropi »

josephcsible wrote: post #373
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 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

Code is not sentient, has no human rights, masters don't create slaves out of caffeine, etc. etc. This analogy does not hold at all in my opinion.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#483

Post by jeltz »

bastardoperator wrote: post #117
towelrod wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should not have to opt out. GitHub should have to respect my license. I already said they can use my code, as long as they keep an attribution intact (via a BSD license, for example) GitHub is taking my code and ignoring the license. I don’t understand why anyone would think that is ok.

No, you're ignoring what you agreed to when you accepted the terms of service. GitHub can display your code, and YOU granted them that license by accepting their terms. I find the only people making these OSS claims haven't used copilot and tend to lack any real contributions to OSS. What you're describing is just simply not the case for 99.9 percent of the code snippets being produced/generated based on data from Gi…

Not everyone who has code at GitHub uploaded it personally. Plenty of code was written before GitHub even existed and that code is still uploaded there.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#484

Post by Naracion »

natefinch wrote: post #456
yucky wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the argument is now it takes considerably less brain power to do, thereby increasing the labor pool and devaluing the output.

That's still 100% true of the examples I mentioned. There's always a higher level to consider. When we moved to C, we could stop worrying about what registers we were using. When we moved to python/Java we could stop worrying about managing memory. When we moved to web frameworks we stoping writing the guts of our servers. And if anything, programmers have become even better paid, despite so many more people in the i…

I agree with you--however, programmers have not become even better paid because society values programmers. They have become better paid because software is a relatively new artefact in human society which has taken the human life by storm, which has made software companies immensely profitable, which meant more companies wanted to create software and attract the people that could help them do it.

As software takes a back seat (or at least a "normal" seat) in society, would we see a normalization of income? Could this be hastened by the development and introduction of tools such as copilot?

Potentially, unless there are new / better things that humans can claim they can provide compared to AI tools. This is the point where I think you and I agree, and I think it's your primary argument in any case (unless I'm mistaken).

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#485

Post by reitanuki »

eulers_secret wrote: post #129
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…

IMO it kinda speaks loudly that Gitea's development happens on github ! There's a reason that's the case, and it's likely one of the reasons I should just use github as well; despite being morally opposed to what they're doing WRT copilot.

That's because when Gitea was early in development, it would have been not usable enough to develop itself (the Gitea people have a post somewhere explaining about it; how too-early dogfooding can actually make things worse as you try to implement 'urgent' features in a rushed manner rather than taking the time to do it right).

Sibling has already provided the tracking issue for getting off it; as far as I remember it's close now :-)

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#486

Post by qayxc »

doodlesdev wrote: post #341
qayxc wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I'm just reading static text on a web page, theres'a absolutely no reason why I should need javascript to just read it. 100% true if the site is privately funded. In most other cases JS is required for ad integration and analytics. I don't like it, but I understand that funding is required and ads are the simplest way to get there without getting into the whole micro-payment and paid subscription mess.

Forcing people to run JavaScript does not guarantee that Analytics or Ads will run as these might get blocked by DNS, Extensions or even the browser itself. I understand the need for them but I don't think it excuses the need to run JavaScript to see text. By the way Hacker News has ads on their main page and the website works perfectly without JavaScript, and even better with it enabled! IMO the job of JavaScript is…

> Forcing people to run JavaScript does not guarantee that Analytics or Ads will run as these might get blocked by DNS, Extensions or even the browser itself.

True for power users on PCs, but keep in mind that many users use smartphones [0] and tablets nowadays to access websites. The possibilities to block analytics and ads are severely limited on these devices.

JS is also sometimes used to "protect" content from scraping by bots (I cannot comment on how effective this is is, but I've seen it a lot). Again, I agree that JS shouldn't be used like this, but sadly it is.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/277125/share-of-website-...

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#487

Post by account42 »

pabs3 wrote: post #463
JoshTriplett wrote: post #353

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... 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 happ…

If copyright goes away, that won't magically make the source code of all proprietary software public. The only thing that will be liberated is existing shared-source software.

It won't magically make the source code appear but it will allow

a) Those who do have the source code to share it. Sometimes the source code is available but it can still not be freely used and/or shared.

b) Allow modifications and redistribution of the binary artefacts, which for is sufficient for many goals.

c) Remove all concerns with reverse engineering and allow e.g. decompiling programs and sharing that source.

Also, remember that the GPL already does not make source available externally if the modfications are only used internally.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#488

Post by notpushkin »

pabs3 wrote: post #463
JoshTriplett wrote: post #353

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... 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 happ…

If copyright goes away, that won't magically make the source code of all proprietary software public. The only thing that will be liberated is existing shared-source software.

It will make reverse-engineering (non-clean room, even) legal, though.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#489

Post by notpushkin »

natefinch wrote: post #441
sossles wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At one point does AI recreating patterns it has seen from reading source code count as a derived work? What if a human learns to code by reading only GPLed code, does all the code they write fall under GPL as a derived work now?

Some interesting reading: https://felixreda.eu/2021/07/github-copilot-is-not-infringin... https://fossa.com/blog/analyzing-legal-implications-github-c...

> “If you look at the GitHub Terms of Service, no matter what license you use, you give GitHub the right to host your code and to use your code to improve their products and features,” [Kate] Downing, [an IP lawyer specializing in FOSS compliance] says. “So with respect to code that’s already on GitHub, I think the answer to the question of copyright infringement is fairly straightforward.”

This has some interesting implications – for example, it means I can't mirror somebody else's (open source) code on GitHub without their explicit agreement.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#490

Post by account42 »

warkdarrior wrote: post #432
notriddle wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They could also cache that computed menu and proactively update the cache whenever the relevant keys are changed. Either way, pretty far from "cannot be fixed without breaking the API".
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