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Saying Goodbye to GitHub

ersei.net

81–90 of 450 posts

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#81

I tend to disregard articles that default to the "Stochastic Parrot" argument. These tools are useful now, I don't personally care about achieving actual intelligence. I want additional utility for myself and other humans, which these provide now, at scale. By a lot of measures many humans perform at just about the same level, including confidently making up bullshit. This post reads like one of the "Goodbye X online…

Being useful and a stochastic parrot are not mutually exclusive. And I in fact think the opposite. it's Necessary to remind people what it really is, especially in this phase of "Enthusiasm" because I see to many people attributing some meaning or some hidden Insight and especially some innate infallibility to AI nowdays, maybe confused by the name AI.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#82
I abandoned github the day that they (and others, including people here) started arguing that their ToS trumps your code's license. That's absurd. It's authoritarian, it's hostile, it's an act of enmity. Fuck all that bullshit. I do business with no entity, period, that treats me with that level of disdain.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#83
post #74

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'…

> I'm not aware of any Open Source license,or Free license for that matter,that has a give-back clause. §5.c of the GPL Version 3 states explicitly: > You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they…

Modifications you distribute have to be given back. You don't have to distribute the modifications though.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#84
People is so melodramatic. Yes this is the future, yes AI is scary, but this is it. Whether you like it or not, technology and life can continue without you. We could very well be living in what Intelligence from another era lead to and it is happening all over again. Life is short, enjoy the ride.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#85

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'…

Yeah on the one hand, isn't opening your source all about not really minding what happens to it after that? It's intended to be copied and used. On the other hand something about the term "laundering" kind of resonated for me. It's kind of like automated plagiarism where you spread your copying out over millions of people. But plagiarism only has meaning as an offense when the thing being copied isn't intended to be copied. But for copyright purposes is there a difference between copying exactly, and the type of blending a LLM does? I'm too confused. That feeling when you hit on something society has never thought about before.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#86
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. W…

> Yes, I'm talking explicitly about feelings. I know my feelings don't impact the legalities of a license. They don't impact the current legality of a licence, but it will affect future ones. GPL/BSD/Apache/proprietary, they are all picked for ideological concerns which all stem from feelings. It is good to discuss these things, and it is good to recognise that these are emotionally driven.

They are emotionally driven, but that is not all there is too it. They are also driven by an insight, that most people/organisations do not give back to the community, unless obligated to do so. It is about advancement of society and goods everyone can use, if only they give back to society, when it is their turn to share.

This is exactly what code laundering ANNs circumvent and that might open up a dystopian future for all of us, not only us code monkeys, but society in general.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#87
post #56

See I've been doing Open Source for a long time and I love that GitHub/OpenAI/Microsoft is training on my code. I want it to be helpful. I'd prefer to run my own version, but we are I guess between 3 and 6 months from having competitive open offerings. When I write open source code I'm serious about the open, non-discriminatory nature of it.

FWIW, that's great for your intentions with "open source code", but some people--like myself--in fact explicitly placed licenses on our code (and additionally did not even upload it to GitHub ourselves: our code is open source and of course anyone can edit it in public and redistribute it) that add "discriminatory" clauses as we aren't merely being purely altruistic: we are attempting to help provide code as ammunition in a war against developers who would attempt to lock users out of control over their own technology.

When you put your code under GPL (as I explicitly and actively chose to; or to put your content under something like the Creative Commons ShareAlike license, which I've explicitly used for many photos I've distributed over the years) you are purposefully choosing to help only those people who are willing to agree to the same level of open-ness in their products. And, as a reader, you know that if you read my code and "learn" from it, you are tainting yourself in a way that might make it difficult to later defend yourself from claims I might make.

To the extent to which it is legal for Copilot to train a model off my code as it might be fair use as some kind of transformative work, I want to be clear that I do not at all believe it is legal for someone to USE Copilot to write software that might be similar to my software... at least without having their lawyers carefully vet the resulting code it generates to determine that none of the expressive intent of my code has managed to leak through Copilot's attempt to launder my code as the user attempts to "autocomplete" something similar.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#88
post #33

> The code that was regurgitated by the model is marketed as "AI generated" and available for use for any project you want. Including proprietary ones. It's laundering open-source code. All of the decades of knowledge and uncountable hours of work is being, well, stolen. There is nothing being given back. Leaving GitHub wont change that, OpenAI is training its models on every bit of code they can have, sourcehut, cod…

I like sourcehut, I'm just not a fan of email oriented collaboration workflow, so I dont use it. And the rest of the world isn't either, if the success of github is anything to go by. I get that Drew likes it, the greybeards are used to it, it works, it's adequate, and it keeps things simple, but I just never could do it. I don't like git either tbh, I grumble while I use it. IMO the perfect collaboration suite would be something like fossil with RSS feeds for every action.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that AI usage of code is somewhat murky with current licenses,which obviously don't mention it either way. Free software has a principle of "freedom to run, to do whatever you wish" (freedom 0), so arguably has said that training AI is OK. (We could quibble over the word Run, but the Gnu.org,and RMS clearly say "freedom 0 does not restrict how you use it." GPL code can be used by the military to develop nucle…

I have no problem with Copilot being trained on AGPL code and the getting released with a AGPL compatible license. Free to do whatever they want with it. The problem is Copilot training on source code and then discarding any restrictions of the licenses. Maybe it is legal right now but I'm sure this case will find it's way into open source licenses pretty soon.

Do we know if CoPilot X was trained on AGPL, not just GPL?

Additionally I'm not sure if AGPL does anything.

I suspect the ethics and such of licensing when large fractions of work are training AI and using AI need to be worked out rather than getting mad at any individual.

What does copy left look like for AI?

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#90
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You agree to Microsoft's ToS before you can put any code on Github, regardless of the license. You can't opt-out of those terms, regardless of your license, just as you can't opt out of Facebooks terms which give them the right to use your content for their business or marketing purposes, even if the various chain posts that have spread there might claim otherwise.

The vast majority of the code I've written that is on GitHub isn't on GitHub because I would ever have stooped to putting it there, but because it is open source under a license that lets other people redistribute and edit the code (most often GPL or AGPL; maybe some older code under BSD) and they have chosen to use GitHub (which makes me sad, but as far as I'd have been concerned is totally within their rights). Are…

Well upthread the discussion changed to using a non-open license that prevents people from training AI on it. If you released software under such a license, someone re-uploading to Github would probably be violating their terms or yours. Regardless, Microsoft would probably remove the repo if you contacted them to let them know you're the copyright holder, and the software license is incompatible with their terms.

It remains to be seen if they have a way to then clean their training data of the influence.

It would be the same situation if someone uploaded any other proprietary code.

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