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Saying Goodbye to GitHub

ersei.net

251–260 of 450 posts

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People should not beg for their work for a start. If you use it, you should pay for it. A small fee, or a fee that is set by the dev.

I use a lot of open source software and directly pay for approximately none of it. Do you behave differently and pay for it today? What do you use to accomplish (track and manage) that?

That's the problem there are no systems in place for it. So if there is no UI for payments on github, people will never stop for a moment to think about what they take for granted.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 don't impact the current legality of a license, but it will affect future ones. Don't they? Even the most liberal licenses require that you at least keep the license and attributions. Which are exactly the parts that AI systems remove. I would have no problem with an AI system trained on GPL code if the output was still covered by the GPL.

You misunderstood. Their emotions do not impact current licences, but their choice of licence is an emotional act.

There are plenty of arguments to choose a licence, and as the world changes we will evolve. See how the GPL itself evolved to handle TiVo. These things arent static.

I personally agree that GPL trained code should produce GPL code, I see a distiction between teaching people and teaching computers but that isn't my call.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#253
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…

This whole open source thing is the biggest farce on planet Earth. Someone with a good knowledge about geeks and their behaviour concocted up this open source bullshit. So now talented people give their skill to the "whole" and they have to beg for contributions and donations to get by. And other geeks (not suits with ties) finance the ones they sympathise with. It's ridiculous. And faceless entities use their hard w…

I don’t think open source per-se but certainly permissive licenses like Apache were a mistake. They’ve just allowed business to either get free things to make a profit while contributing nothing back or to literally create a business by selling the Apache licensed programs in the cloud.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#255

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'…

From the MIT license:

> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

Does GPT spit out the copyright notice when it regurgitates my code?

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#256

I kept my github account to report issues on the projects still on github. Even though github is own by the untrustable msft, it (still) does work with noscript/basic (x)html browsers (well I created my account probably a decade ago). gitlab: I cannot even create an account.

Stop reporting issues to github.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#257

Github has too many open source resources for people to get up and quit. Code repositories on github are akin to google services; the logo may not be there but the foundations seep through to our existing products.

Code on github is not open source, end of story.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#258

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'…

IMHO, just like there was a robots.txt file made for the web, there needs to be a NOAI.txt for git repos. Sorry, this repo does not permit you to ingest the code for a learning model. Seems completely reasonable.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#259
I have also been using GitHub since the early octocat days (2009?). But never saw it as this magical place the blog describes. Consider that we concurrently had access to really magical feeling collaborative open source tools like ruby gems and npm. By comparison, Sourceforge felt way more magical during it's generation.

What WAS and IS magical, is git, as a fully distributed, has everything you need but not too much, beautiful repository with easy to use history editing to cultivate sensible code trees. The only magic from GitHub imo was that it made git the defacto standard when we could easily be stuck using svn today.

As for his points about AI being against the philosophy of open source, I imagine he will have the ear of RMS and a few other absolutists, but in my personal experience AI assistance has lit a fire of individual empowerment for the little guy wanting to take on big projects so bright that I think it is the single best thing we have left to save open source. It is a new wave of open source, and we can collaborate with 100% of the population instead of 5%.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. In essence, copyleft licenses are exactly that. They oblige the author of a derived work to publish the changes to all users under the same terms. The original authors tend to be users. So, a license which would grant this directly to the original authors woul…

I'm not sure I agree with this as a general point of view. Speaking generally, I'm not sure that one can claim >> The original authors tend to be the users There are endless forks of say emacs,and I expect RMS is not s user of any of them. Of course RMS is free to inspect the code for all of them, separate out bug fixes from features, and retro apply it to his build. But I'm not seeing anything in any license that re…

> Licenses are matters of law, not spirit.

But also, i think even the spirit of the original copyleft movement is being misunderstood. As a GP said, the spirit was about centering users, requiring developers to be responsible to _users_, in order to create the kind of society where our _use_ of technology would be unconstrained in certain ways.

It was not about anything owed to the "original" developers, it was not about developers responsibility to other developers. In original spirit, even. It was definitely not about creating a system where people could make adequate income from writing software. That was not even the spirit in which the licenses were devised.

(To be fair, it also imagined/hoped that a large portion of (but not all) users could also be "developers" in the sense they could tweak software to meet their needs -- for their own and others use, though, not for money. Even if users would be coding, the "spirit" still centered them as users, and centered the conditions of use, their needs and desires for how that software would work, not conditions of profit or income from charging people for software use).

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