Ironically I believe GitHub should play a bigger part in OSS. They and a few other platforms have a unique position which could help to make open source software more sustainable: https://dusted.codes/fund-oss-through-package-managers
It makes no sense.
A library downloaded 3 times a year might just have users that know how to set up a local cache, while a library used by unskilled teams will be downloaded 15 times every time they run a build.
All your model does is push people to learn how to make local caches, and it also doesn't work at all with FLOSS licenses, since there is a right to redistribute.
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 cau…
/* I know it's off-topic, but symptoms look very much like a DNS problem, or a firewall problem. */
Charging money for GPL'd software is explicitly allowed [1]. I suppose this is how e.g. Red Hat operates. [1]: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
So then what exactly is the article objecting to? Sorry, I musta missed something.
The article does not; the comment I answered to, yes.
> Nitpick: Fair use isn't an exemption from copyright, it's a defense for violating copyright) Nitpick: Fair use is both a Constitutional and statutory (the latter codifying the former) limitation on the exclusive rights granted as part of copyright, so it's definitely an exception. Procedurally, it operates as a defense, but that's not inconsistent with it being an exception.
True, the contrast here would be e.g. copyright law as usually found in EU states, where the are actual, enumerated lists of exceptions to copyright. Fair dealing as used by some former UK colonies seems more similar to the EU approach than US fair use doctrine. "Training of ML models with data not licensed to you and then selling the output of the model" isn't on those lists, and consequently is a flagrant copyright…
> True, the contrast here would be e.g. copyright law as usually found in EU states, where the are actual, enumerated lists of exceptions to copyright.
How is that a contrast? The US has an actual, enumerated list of exceptions (the US term is “limitations on exclusive rights”, of which fair use is, in the US Code order, the first.)
> free software wants to strengthen copyright. I would have thought that most were against IP in general That's a misunderstanding. In a world without any concept of authorship and copyright, people would share, modify and redistribute books, drawing, musical scores... But most software can be compiled (and even obfuscated), making it unpractical to further modify and redistribute a copy. This means than in such word…
> But most software can be compiled (and even obfuscated), making it unpractical to further modify and redistribute a copy. Tell that to people who remove DRM restrictions, fix bugs and then distribute the result. The only reason there aren't companies and university courses dedicated for such modifications is that it's illegal.
What part of "unpractical" did you not understand? You expect a FOSS ecosystem to flourish with people sharing only patched binaries?
> 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. I mean it does in the short term, because Microsoft trains it on public GitHub code. Beyond that, as long as Microsoft is operating under their “fair use” theo…
Would this still apply if the license explicitly forbids use for AI training?
Yes, if it is a use that doesn't require permission from the copyright owner, the license is irrelevant (unless you can demonstrate that the person doing the license-prohibited use agreed to the license anyway, in some context that makes it legally binding such as a contract.)
When its my IP i can enforce it, send them a DMCA or sue them for damages. They used my stuff without having a license to do so. If they slapped an own license on it, granting others permission to it, that would increase the damages.
Ok, but you'd have to prove it.
For git repos, include the current revision of your master branch as metadata to an SEPA transaction. This is a legal solid proof that you had code at time X.
True, the contrast here would be e.g. copyright law as usually found in EU states, where the are actual, enumerated lists of exceptions to copyright. Fair dealing as used by some former UK colonies seems more similar to the EU approach than US fair use doctrine. "Training of ML models with data not licensed to you and then selling the output of the model" isn't on those lists, and consequently is a flagrant copyright…
> True, the contrast here would be e.g. copyright law as usually found in EU states, where the are actual, enumerated lists of exceptions to copyright. How is that a contrast? The US has an actual, enumerated list of exceptions (the US term is “limitations on exclusive rights”, of which fair use is, in the US Code order, the first.) See the section headings in Title 17, Chapter 1: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/t…
Fair use itself is open-ended, and not enumerated. US law has fair use and other limitations. In contrast, EU law does not have open-ended limitations, but only the fixed, enumerated limitations. So I don't get your point here - US law leaves significant room for interpreting limitations on copyright via fair use. EU law doesn't.
> You don't need hosting to use git. This, 100%. Git is useful for all your textual versioning needs - but your friends don't really need access to all your git repos. The whole idea of putting your whole life on GitHub is a dev's equivalent of putting all your life on Facebook - an excellent idea, as far as Microsoft and Facebook are concerned. If you can't sell ads to coders, then perhaps you can sell them recycled…
Except for when GH wasn't owned by Microsoft for almost a decade...
The problem with that is that at that time GH was surviving with VC money. That money entered with the promise that at some point GH would monetize their users. The "paid account" model wasn't enough for them, And now that Microsoft owns them it's also not enough. They've found another way to monetize all that code.
It surprises me though that Microsoft hasn't added a Stack overflow like panel to github. More. People are jumping between GH for the code AZ md StackOverflow for the support.
The issue is that if you, as a human, regurgitated swaths of GPL code verbatim, you would be in violation of copyright.
I can't fathom the amount of copyright infringement the Ctrl, C and V keys have caused.
You might not be able, but larger enterprises pay serious money for solutions that make sure that the code is clean, so that a junior copypaster won't make the company liable.