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Give up GitHub: The time has come

sfconservancy.org

511–520 of 585 posts

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#511

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!”

Let me provide you with a counter-example.

Suppose that there's a law that states that water and access to it is always supposed to remain public, because water is a public good.

Suppose that someone comes tomorrow and starts claiming ownership of all the water springs in your country, he becomes the only entry point to get water, and you have to pay him a fee every time you open a tap.

Is he still free to do so? In other words, is the freedom of someone who restrict the freedoms for everyone else still a form of freedom that is worth even considering, let alone respecting?

Because the foundation of your ideas is exactly the reason why capitalism fucked things up and just let a bunch of jerks get rich without merit.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#512
post #416
post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That list is a perfect example why GitHub is so problematic. Forget Copilot. Even without that you’ve put all of those services in one centralized basket, fully controlled by a for-profit company (with proven track record of unethical behavior). And not only that, but this is true for the vast majority of FOSS projects!

> fully controlled by a for-profit company This is only a serious problem if you are not paying them for it. The current situation is how 99% of thr world works everywhere.

As if paying MS will stop them from deprecating services.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It looks like the only feature blocking their move to self-host is importing data (issues and PRs) exported from GitHub. Which is to say, it's perfectly ready for hosting new projects.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is funny to me because it was up to date and the particular issue wasn’t driver related: it was specifically that after not touching it at all for a couple months each subsequent time I logged in it would randomly lock up, took about 15min to boot.

This is practically guaranteed to be "driver" related, unless it was only one specific binary that was "locking up".

It would lock up as in just take an extremely long time to do certain things in the UI. That sounds like a pretty odd way for a driver issue to manifest, but maybe I'm missing something.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#515
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I have written code which is hosted on GitHub which other people have uploaded and I have signed no agreement to let them do so. Does this mean all open source projects older than GitHub need to stop using it?

No idea at that point. If the code had a license that forbid reupload you could ask GitHub to remove it. Otherwise that's the price of open source, you don't get to choose.

You do get to choose what license you release under and people need to respect that license - ML code laundering or not.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#516

> 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…

Exactly, this is such griping nonsense from people who are scared of where the industry is heading.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#517
post #166

> “a broader conversation [about the ethics of AI-assisted software] seemed unlikely to alter your [SFC's] stance, which is why we [GitHub] have not responded to your [SFC's] detailed questions” To be fair, there is a valid point here. If even one party has already made their conclusions and enters into a discussion with no willingness to even entertain ideas, instead just to fight their corner, then why would other…

I think it's the other way around - if you only talk to those whose stance you think you can change then you are implicitly admitting that you are unwilling to change your stance. Otherwise there would still be value in hearing the other party out to see if they have anything to say that would make you reconsider your position.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#518
post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freedom of the code to its users vs Freedom of the users of the code

There's no difference. Freedom is freedom. Adding qualifications to it inherently makes it less free.

Freedom is not, and cannot be, an absolute. If I am 100% free, that by definition restricts the freedom of others (for instance, if I am free to punch you in the face, you are not free to not be punched in the face; if I am free to own you as a slave, you thus lose a lot of freedoms).

Determining what freedom should mean is not, and has never been, a simple matter of "well, if you make any restrictions on it, then it's not real freedom, so everyone just gets to be free!" It's all about finding balance, and dealing with nuance, and all that frustrating hard stuff.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I think you're actually both right, in different ways.

Fairly self-evidently, the sane fundamental principle for a business is "make a good/provide a service, and if you do so well, you make a good profit".

Unfortunately, for the past few decades, businesses in the Western world (and particularly the US) have increasingly been operating based on a fundamental principle of "make as much money as you possibly can, and if you have to make a good/provide a service to do so, that's a necessary evil".

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#520
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitLab is mentioned on the advocacy page https://giveupgithub.org/ . GitLab is an open-core business, which means there is a permissively licensed FOSS version and a proprietary version. The gitlab.com website uses the proprietary version. In addition many features of GitLab don't work at all or work much less well if you turn off JavaScript. They have swayed a lot of ostensibly FOSS, copyleft-leaning and privacy/sec…

> In addition many features of GitLab don't work at all or work much less well if you turn off JavaScript. I feel like the venn diagram of people who complain about JS being required and of people who have never had to code up a web /app/ that users expect rich interactions without a page-reload is just a circle.

No one is asking your to not progressively enhance the experience with javascript only that it is not needed to access the content.
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