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

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

#41
post #2

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

https://codeberg.org Its based in Europe and focuses on free and open source software.

However I doubt I can really say its not politically charged.

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

#43
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Huh? What if someone else claims they wrote your code and slaps a license on it?

They could do that if you licensed it too. It would be illegal just the same.

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

#44
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)…

Have a look at Gitea. You can run it as a podman rootless container off the box on your local machine. The functionality is there, the community refuses to switch. There people who still have the idea that gh is still whatvit was 10 years ago.

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

#45
post #2

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

Given the breadth of services Github provide, forge federation using ActivityPub (and ForgeFed extensions) open standards look very promising. A whole host of projects are working on it, and among them is Gitea. They will likely be the first to federate with other instances, so you can work on remote projects from your own environment.

Here is an overview of the federation activities: https://forgefriends.org/blog/2022/06/30/2022-06-state-forge...

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

#46
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.

In most jurisdictions, copyright is automatic. If you put no license on the code, the default is "all rights reserved"; that is, no one can do anything with it.

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

#47
post #28
post #2

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

The Conservancy post/site mention SourceHut (thats in the US though): https://sourcehut.org/

At https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/ they also mention CodeBerg, which is hosted in the EU. https://codeberg.org/

It's git-only. FWIW, I chose SourceHut in part because they support git and Mercurial, and I'm a Mercurial user. [1]

FWIW, the main SourceHut developer last year moved to the Netherlands. https://drewdevault.com/2022/03/24/Netherlands-update.html , and commented "I will be re-locating SourceHut, the incorporated entity, to the Netherlands, and gradually moving our infrastructure over the pond."

[1] Also because SourceHut is whole-heartedly pro-free software, and also because I feel better being able to pay for a service than depend on the largess of a large company, and also because I don't like monocultures.

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

#48

Maybe its time to have versions of various open source licenses that expressly prohibit such use. GPLv4?

GitHub appears to be relying on a fair-use defense for Copilot. So it doesn't matter what license you slap on the code; if they're correct that their use constitutes fair use, as long as they can see your code, they can use it.

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

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

Have a look at Gitea. You can run it as a podman rootless container off the box on your local machine. The functionality is there, the community refuses to switch. There people who still have the idea that gh is still whatvit was 10 years ago.

We tried to migrate to Gitea at my company, ~100 repositories with a bunch of mirrors, lots of CI, renovate-bot using the API, etc. It was a disaster. It was unusably slow (10+ seconds to load the list of pull requests, API calls to open a new pull request timing out after 60s) despite never using more than a tiny fraction of the resources of a 16-core server. We tried to engage with the community to find out the cause of the slowness and were met with open hostility.

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

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep getting this wrong. Your license is irrelevant. Copilot depends entirely on being exempt from copyright restrictions (under fair use doctrine), and you cannot restrict this with any license, because they're not using that license. The only way you can stop them using your code so is to not share it with anyone. If they find your code (even via a leak!), they can legally use it, if their fair use claim is…

If so, then the other edge of the sword may be sharp enough. Collect all bigco source code leaks and create a fancy Schmopilot model out of it. Publish said model on GitHub.

I suspect any such model will have weird biases that don't match public usage. Monolith code can be impressive, but it probably only happens outside the context window of Copilot.
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