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Give up GitHub: The time has come

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Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#501

Post by account42 »

reitanuki wrote: post #485
eulers_secret wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

For early development that makes sense. But if Gitea is not ready to self-host now then it is also not ready to host most other projects so that doesn't really invalidate the criticism. However from the sibling comments it seems that the move to self-hosting is in progress.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#502

Post by account42 »

dcz_self wrote: post #86
NoGravitas wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally the ones I don't mind losing. If anyone can't figure out how to send a git pull request or patchset by email, I'm happy for them to email me with questions on how to, which I will answer as best I can.

I can figure out how to send you a patch set via email (see my Linux kernel contributions), but if I can avoid doing that, sure as heck I will. Your project must be really important to me, or I have to get paid. As for the reason, it's simple: the process of submitting patches sucks. I wrote about it: https://dcz_self.gitlab.io/posts/git-botch-email

Honestly, if you can't be arsed to format an email then why should you expect anyone to spend the effort to review your patches and maintain your additions going forward.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#503

Post by account42 »

SftwrSvior81 wrote: post #172
10x-dev wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is objectively not ludicrous. It might go against the commonly taught idea that businesses should focus solely on generating profits, but it is not unreasonable to create a system where businesses have to keep the common good in mind. There is a difference between 'how things are now' and 'how things could be'. Imagining and wanting a different status quo is not by itself ludicrous (especially since we all stand t…

It's not just a "commonly taught idea that businesses should focus solely on generating profit", it's the fundamental principle upon which economies are built today almost anywhere in the world. Sure, there are other ways of organizing economic systems, but to suggest that we are simply or easily going to switch to one is unrealistic. Imagining and wanting a different status quo will not lead to a different status qu…

> It's not just a "commonly taught idea that businesses should focus solely on generating profit", it's the fundamental principle upon which economies are built today almost anywhere in the world.

It's hardly the fundamental principle. The fundamental principle is that people need things to survive and its more efficient if people specialize and trade than if everyone creates everything they need.

The pervase idea that businesses should focus solely on generating profit is also directly responsible for lots of problems almost anywhere in the world from driving out less vicious competitors to rent seeking to externalizing costs to everyone else e.g. via pollution.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#504

Post by npteljes »

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…

Forcing the code to be open is the kind of freedom where restricting locally something enables the freedom globally. Granting the freedom to do whatever with the code will make the code end up used in closed ways, empowering those who close the code.

A similar line of thought is the "paradox of tolerance", which posits that if a society tolerates the intolerant, the tolerance of that society will lessen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#505

Post by npteljes »

entropi wrote: post #482
josephcsible wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

No, it's a good analogy, because it's not between the similarity of people and code. The cases are similar, because in both you restrict freedom to enable freedom.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#506

Post by npteljes »

seadan83 wrote: post #176

As a leader of a FOSS project that is on github, and migrated off of sourceforge because SVN and email patches were not scaling - I'm a bit confused by this article. Co-pilot has issues, ergo github is going the way of sourceforge, and so now we must abandon github? Do I have that reasoning correct? We need to: - migrate the bug queue - have all links in commit history break - application integration with githib for…

>What else to add to this pile.. and all because co-pilot smells??

You are absolutely right that this all is a huge pain in the ass. GitHub, and later Microsoft, played their cards well. The product both works well, and also creates such a moat of vendor lock-in that it won't make sense to leave.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#507

Post by blacklight »

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…

Just to clarify: you seem to believe that most of our code isn't good enough, so copying it is not a big deal.

Do you feel the same about other creative processes as well? Can I rip a Justin Bieber's song and say that it's mine just because it's a shitty song anyway, so who cares? Or does this only apply to software because software is somehow an "inferior" art? Do licenses even have any legal value to you?

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#508

Post by danaris »

notpushkin wrote: post #489
natefinch wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How so? I'm not seeing any language in there that implies exclusivity...

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#509

Post by natefinch »

pabs3 wrote: post #464
janosdebugs wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's one thing I'm missing from all these discussions and posts: is the generated code even copyrightable? IANAL, but code snippets often fall under the "scènes à faire" doctrine (everybody would do it in a similar way), in which case it's not. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sc%C3%A8nes_%C3%A0_faire

GitHub seems to think it is copyrightable, personally I doubt it is, simply because a human didn't create it and the process it was created by was automatic with no creativity.

Well, if the entire thing was generated, then no (according to the first link I posted above), since it was not produced by a human. However, no useful program is going to be entirely written by an AI, so any real program would have quite a lot of user input (I regularly will take what copilot suggests and then tweak it to what I specifically want). And then, yeah, it's copyrightable.

Also, there's no way for anyone to know what portion of code that I commit was hand written vs. generated, so you kind of have to treat it all as written by the committer anyway.

Though this does bring up interesting questions about what happens with things like automated PRs that fix bugs / update dependencies... are those then non-copyrightable? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#510

Post by NoGravitas »

account42 wrote: post #499
sreevisakh wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am not that excited about that last part, but federating pull requests sounds like a killer feature Git already has a pull request feature [1] that's as federated as it can get. The 'request-pull' command can be used to request pull on upstream repositories hosted anywhere (or not at all). The only requirement is that the downstream clone must be online. I know that HN isn't particularly found of email-based work…

> But requesting a pull is as simple as copying the output and mailing it (or via any text messaging service) to the maintainer. I love email based workflows as much as anyone but for many people this is not "simple". For one, you need to be able to send plain text email or at least not have your client mangle it too much.

I can see this being difficult for random people, but I can't imagine it being a hard ask for developers.
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