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Give up GitHub: The time has come

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Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very "american" definition of freedom, which is basically, just let me do what I want. GPL uses a different definition of freedom, which I prefer. They look at consequences of restrictions / permissions, and their implication on freedom (not just for me, but for everyone). So some restrictions can lead to actually more freedom, while some permissions can actually decrease freedom. This is similar to gun-con…

> This is a very "american" definition of freedom, which is basically, just let me do what I want. Eh. I see what you’re saying about gun control, but the idea that “some restrictions can lead to actually more freedom, while some permissions can actually decrease freedom” is actually very American. The free software movement says that everyone deserves software freedom. The Declaration of Independence similarly says…

Thanks to put things in context, that was quite interesting!

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#562
post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That could be prevented by EULAs though.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That scenario plays itself out time and time again. 1. Base technology arrives and is adopted en masse 2. Some entity wraps it in an easier-to-use interface 3. After some time, that interface becomes the de facto standard 4. Developers who started developing after #2 and especially #3 don't understand how the underlying technology works or even that the wrapper is just a wrapper I'm reminded of how many Juniors I tra…

Is the takeaway here, then, to beat third parties to the punch when creating a new technology and include a first-party easy-to-use interface right out of the gate?

Yes and no, IMO.

Yes, sure, that could be one useful strategy.

But no, you can't demand it as some kind of mandatory component for a project to "count as a real FOSS project".

And for git, especially... It's not as if an easy-to-use interface had ever been a priority there. ;-) What one could ask for from them, though, IMO, would be a website of their own where they at least explain what it is. Because if such a thing exists, I must have missed it. I mean, git-scm.whatever isn't that, is it? That feels more like... Idunno, it's actually Atlassian in a thin disguise, isn't it?

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually (almost) got in trouble once for this because people thought I was posting code publicly on Github when I was merely creating a local repository in my home directory. I had to explain what Git was and how it was not Github.

The same thing happens with people who should know better that google or even the www is not "the internet"

How many of us have parents (or, OK, for all you youngsters: grandparents) that assume not only that the Web is the Internet, but that Facebook is the Web?

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#565

SourceForge CEO here. The first paragraph of this article is wrong. SourceForge has been built on Apache Allura since 2011. https://allura.apache.org

Yeah, because that was the substantive point about your company, its business model, and its relationship to the FOSS community that was made in the article.

Not.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#566
post #418

Ugh, is this the next big thing? Ragging on Github and Copilot due to some nebulous claims of freedom? I think I’ve seen 3 articles about this in just the past week…

What's "nebulous" about having your chosen license for your project ignored – in practice, rescinded – when it's uploaded to GitHub by someone who may or may not be you?

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#567
post #413

While I appreciate the earnest defense of FOSS and the, in all fairness, totally warranted suspicion of Microsoft, given its history, I found the attitude of this article to be very sour and, actually, in bad faith. Let me address the three questions which they posed to MS: > 1. What case law, if any, did you rely on in Microsoft & GitHub's public claim, stated by GitHub's (then) CEO, that: “(1) training ML systems o…

1) "Bad faith"

1: What other kind of faith in Microsoft would be even remotely warranted?

2) "perfectly reasonable and legitimate explanation ... risks exposing trade secrets ... a separate concern from potentially accidentally violating a license"

2 a: Sure, they may be separate concerns, but Microsoft is acting -- and you, by arguing for them, at least im- but AFAICS explicitly endorsing their viewpoint -- as if their interest obviously overrides everyone else's. Why should it? They're the ones who want to do this, so why shouldn't their code be the one exposed to any risk? If you want to test if some newfangled house-building material is really as fire resistant as its manufacturers claim, you can set fire to your own house, not your neighbour's. Also, there's only one Microsoft whose interests would be put at risk if they use their own code; but they chose to expose how many others?

2 b: For someone complaining about "bad faith" on the part of others, "potentially accidentally" is some mighty fine weasel wording. What's "accidental" about intentionally building a product and intentionally training it on a bunch of code written by others? (They didn't just randomly press some keys and say "Oops, let's see if it gets trained on our code now, or everybody else's", did they?)

3) "starts by asking 'can you". Then, if the answer is 'no, we can't', reinterprets the answer as 'no, we won't' ('withholding' is an intentional act"

3 a: The word"can" has several valid usages in English. If I say "Can you pass me the salt, please?" and you don't, then you are (assuming you have no severe physical handicap that's stopping you) intentionally withholding the salt from me.

3 b: Even if Microsoft is actually unable to provide the asked for data, the question arises: How come they are? They've built this product. Not building that traceability into it was their choice. Why did they choose not to?

If anyone is "busted" here, it seems to me that's you: Busted as a Microsoft shill.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The word is meaningless and cowardly. It literally just means "has problems."

And by not at least naming one of the problems, the author is being cowardly and/or lazy. It's like describing a reviewed item as "good". It conveys no information other than "I like it". The word "problematic" does the same thing here. It signals that the author doesn't like something but doesn't tell us anything about why. In other words, it's fucking useless.

I would express this as "vague," at worst, not "useless and cowardly." What is "cowardly" about it?

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#569
FWIW, you can help send OpenAI and Microsoft a strong message by filing an official complaint with the FTC, BBB, CA State Attorney General, San Francisco DA office & FBI IP Theft division.

There is currently an open investigation case at the Better Business Bureau (filed by my self), but OpenAi refuses to participate. I.E. OpenAI refuses to defend its business practices in front of a government entity.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#570
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github's position doesn't appear to offer any advantage with regards to Copilot's creation. OpenAI Codex (which copilot grew out of IIRC), Amazon and Salesforce versions of Copilot exist. Huggingface Bloom was trained on a sizeable amount of public code. Tab9, now behind, was one of the earliest to combine public code repositories with Deep learning for smarter autocomplete. The data requirements for Transformer scal…

Is anyone using Dall-E, Imagen, or any other generative model for art to create commercial products? If so, they're probably also concerned about copyright issues. CoPilot is being offered for widespread commercial use, so it's held to a higher standard. Respecting copyright is much more important when you're building a business and not just sharing fun AI art on social media.

OpenAI currently offers a GPT-3 API and an invite only DALLE2 API. Both of these are commercial products trained on web datasets and can output collisions with the training set. They have effectively zero concerns about copyright due to it being covered under fair use and OpenAI having copyright on all outputs (in the case of DALLE2).
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