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Saying Goodbye to GitHub

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Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#21

Post by japhyr »

bruce511 wrote: post #11

I'm gonna get hated on for this, but I don't think "give back" is an open source concept. I'm not aware of any Open Source license,or Free license for that matter,that has a give-back clause. Source code is available to -users- ,not prior-authors. Some Open Source licenses can be used in proprietary code, (MIT, BSD etc) with little more than simple attribution. Those developers chose that license for a reason, and I'…

No need to hate on you for a valid response.

I think we're in a new enough situation that we can look beyond what's legal in a license. When many of us started working on open source projects, AI was a far-off concept. Speaking for myself, I thought we'd see steady improvement in code-completion tools, but I didn't think I'd see anything like GPT-4 in my lifetime.

Licenses were written for humans working with code. We can talk about corporations as well, but when I've thought about corporations in the past, I thought about people working on code at corporations. The idea of an AI using my open source project to generate working code for someone or some corporation feels...different.

Yes, I'm talking explicitly about feelings. I know my feelings don't impact the legalities of a license. But feelings are worth talking about, especially as we're all finding the boundaries of new tools and new ways of working.

I don't agree with everything in the post, but I think this is a great conversation to be having.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#22

Post by Hasnep »

gman83 wrote: post #5

Q: What about the social features of GitHub? I enjoy the discovery and star features. There just isn't any community like it. Where can I get that? It would be great if there was something that had the discovery & social aspects but was agnostic to the actual site hosting the code. Does something like that exist?

Forgejo [1] is working on integrating activitypub [2] which will let instances federate with each other.

[1] https://forgejo.org/ [2] https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#23

Post by bdcravens »

alex_suzuki wrote: post #2

While I agree with the general observation of the article, the tone and wording feels needlessly harsh and subjective. Sentences like „I could go to GitLab, but they have their own fair share of issues and a disgusting UI/UX.“ really diminish the article and by association, also the author.

The author is a college freshman, and that seems pretty par for the course for someone in their late teens. It's not really an "article" targeted for HN critical review, just a blog post on a personal site.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#24

Post by arcanemachiner »

jacquesm wrote: post #18
ethbr0 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ToS doesn't supercede copyright though, does it? The real rub will be the first court precedent on whether GPTs infringe on source data IP. Could see it going either way: fundamentally transformative or not.

It shouldn't but good luck fighting the 500 Lbs gorilla on its home turf. Most people will avoid the fight, even if they are in the right.

This is why I only put code on GitHub if I want it to be seen by everyone (including Big Data).

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#25

Post by TranquilMarmot »

ipsum2 wrote: post #15

Unfortunately moving to Gitlab or Sourcehut doesn't really help, because the underlying model (GPT-x) is trained on the entire internet, so that includes all scrape-able websites. The only way for your data not to be used in GPT (and therefore Copilot) is to not to put it on any website or make it very difficult to access, like encrypting it.

Is that such a bad thing? I write code to get it out there, not for it to be exclusive or something. Any code that I write that helps somebody else in some way is a huge win for me and what keeps me going. If I could, _all_ of the code that I write would be open source or public but as-is the best way to make a living for me is to write closed-source code.

I see my code getting scraped by these AI tools as me having contributed to something greater than the sum of its parts. And I use it! My code helps you, your code helps me.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#26

Post by techdragon »

jacquesm wrote: post #18
ethbr0 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ToS doesn't supercede copyright though, does it? The real rub will be the first court precedent on whether GPTs infringe on source data IP. Could see it going either way: fundamentally transformative or not.

It shouldn't but good luck fighting the 500 Lbs gorilla on its home turf. Most people will avoid the fight, even if they are in the right.

The ToS is necessary for GitHub to provide their services, the wording is pretty carefully constructed so that GitHub are safe to change their service and develop new things. Loosely speaking "by uploading code you grant GitHub permission to blah blah with that code"

I'm not sure how well it will go down in court fighting this... since we agreed to it. But the more interesting question will be is the result a complete "you loose" and GitHub walks away, or if they are forced to take actions in order to defend the copyright of users producing content... a "Code Id" type system that warns you if the code your uploading is too similar to someone else's in order to allow you to use the fun new AI tools to make code and pay GitHub, but also simultaneously defend users legal intellectual property rights.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#27

Post by kmac_ »

alex_suzuki wrote: post #2

While I agree with the general observation of the article, the tone and wording feels needlessly harsh and subjective. Sentences like „I could go to GitLab, but they have their own fair share of issues and a disgusting UI/UX.“ really diminish the article and by association, also the author.

Yeah, I agree that some words could be choosed better, but overall it changed my mind over the use of GPL licenced code. Copilot and other ML tools should not use GPL trained models to create proprietary licenced code.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#28

Post by gyranthology »

alex_suzuki wrote: post #17
praptak wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a personal blog. The author has no obligation to keep it to the standard of a trade magazine. Blogs are supposed to be subjective and it's okay for a blog post to be harsh if the author feels so.

Sure. Just saying that for me personally, it’s a turn-off and makes me take the article less seriously.

For me it's not just the lack of professionalism but the writing makes the author sound pretty junior and inexperienced with how the world works. Not that there's anything wrong with that (we've all been there). But it can cheapen the discussion and feel like what really needs to be untangled is overlooked by stuff like "I was upset because they changed the UI and then I got used to it." Not very interesting details and not very useful thing to discuss.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#29

Post by HWR_14 »

Aaron2222 wrote: post #12
aetherspawn wrote: post #4

Why hasn't someone just changed the GPL license already: "If you train an AI on this code, you must release the source code and generated neural net of that AI as open source" or something to that effect. It won't stop it, but it will slow it down, and it seems like the right T&Cs to put on training against GPL code because it gives an advantage to open source AIs, however minor.

Aren't they claiming that it's fair use? IANAL, but wouldn't that make the licence irrelevant if training AI/ML models was found to be fair use? And if not, it's a licence violation anyway?

Yes, if it's fair use than the license is irrelevant (at least in the US).

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#30

Post by philipphutterer »

ipsum2 wrote: post #15

Unfortunately moving to Gitlab or Sourcehut doesn't really help, because the underlying model (GPT-x) is trained on the entire internet, so that includes all scrape-able websites. The only way for your data not to be used in GPT (and therefore Copilot) is to not to put it on any website or make it very difficult to access, like encrypting it.

Not sure about this, but training a model on the website that displays the code is not quite the same as training it specifically on just the code. Moreover, (raw) repo content files might not even be included in crawled datasets (e.g., look at https://gitlab.com/robots.txt). I think there is something specific to GitHub as it being part of Microsoft that makes processing that data much easier.
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