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Saying Goodbye to GitHub

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Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#311

Post by FrustratedMonky »

bombolo wrote: post #215
cornel_io wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether or not copyright applies at all to model training is an entirely open question, and where rulings have come down, it's likely closer to these situations being fair use (e.g. the Google Book's case, which was ruled transformative and not a direct replacement for the works in question). The reality is, these models don't copy or distribute anything directly, which makes applying copyright a bit of a stretch. Ma…

Would I be able to train an AI only using microsoft's leaked windows code to write a windows clone with no copyright (since it comes from an AI) and be safe from legal repercussions because it was trained on fair use code I just happened to find online? If they rule that it's ok to do that, I might be ok with AI being ruled as fair use.

Exactly. I'm betting if you asked GPT to create a windows clone, for sure MS would not let you distribute. This will go like every other law/license, big corp can sue little guy into the ground. When big corp uses your code it will be 'thats just a model generated code not yours'. But in other direction, if little guys creates windows clone, 'sorry, its off to jail for you maytee'.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#313

Post by FrustratedMonky »

bruce511 wrote: post #151
dijit wrote: post #74

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. §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…

>> As in, all modifications must be made available. Is that not meeting your definition of giving back? Available to all users. Not previous authors. There may be overlap, or there may not be overlap. Plus, I would say it's giving forward, not back. If there are public users then the original authors can become users and get the code. But there will be bug fixes and features smooshed together. Which is why i posit th…

Man, that is really splitting some fine hairs

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#314

Post by m4nu3l »

usrbinbash wrote: post #302
ianbutler wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPT-4 reasons about a lot of gotcha logic puzzles correctly any pre GPT-4 opinions should be reconsidered, that is effectively two different epochs in the history of AI effectiveness and reasoning. > Me: Mike leaves the elevator at the 2nd floor. Jenny leaves at the 9th floor. Who left the elevator first? > GPT-4: Mike left the elevator first, as he got off at the 2nd floor, while Jenny left at the 9th floor. > Me: I…

That changes exactly nothing about the validity of my statement. Yes, GPT-4 is better at this mimicry than GPT-3 or GPT-3.5. And GPT-3 was better at it than GPT-2. And all of them were better than my out-of-fun home-built Language Model projects that I trained on small But being better at mimicking reason, is still not reasoning. The model doesn't know what a coffeemug is, and it doesn't know what a football is. It a…

> But being better at mimicking reason, is still not reasoning

How do I know people are not using a similar process when they perform "reasoning" but with a way more elaborate model?

Can you prove me that the two are inherently different in the type of output they produce regardless of how large a ML model is or can be?

Because if you can't, and they produce the same type of output, the processing could be similar enough to be considered reasoning.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#315

Post by DangitBobby »

friend_and_foe wrote: post #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.

Is this their official stance? I'd love to read about it but web searches lead me back to this comment section.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#316

Post by starkd »

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'…

Perhaps I'm out of the loop on this, but I always thought the concept of open source was primarily about the opportunity for personal professional development. The ability for someone not connected with a corporation to stay relevant and continuously update his skills in away that was not dependent on proprietary systems. That is a huge asset, not only for oneself but also for the the world.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#317

Post by JaumeGreen »

uuuguaii wrote: post #107
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'…

> 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…

> 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 would end up providing the same end result since the original authors would be both allowed to and reasonably expected to distribute the derived work to their users as well.

I might be in the wrong, but this is not how I understand GPL [0]. Care to correct me if I'm wrong.

What I get from the license is that you have to share the code with the users of your program, not anyone else.

AFAIK you could do an Emacs fork and ask money for it. Not only that but the source code only needs to be available to the recipients of the software, not anyone else.

A company could have an upgraded version of a GPL tool and not share it with anyone outside the company. Theoretically employees might share the code outside, but I doubt they'd dared.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Co...

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#318

Post by Ajedi32 »

lelanthran wrote: post #262
fariszr wrote: 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…

> Leaving GitHub wont change that, OpenAI is training its models on every bit of code they can have, sourcehut, codeberg etc. If its public, they will train on it. Not every bit of code, they are respecting proprietary licenses. When MS puts the code for Windows, Office, Azure and everything else in front of ChatGPT, Copilot, whatever other AI learning model they have, then perhaps they have a leg to stand on. Otherw…

AFAIK that has nothing to do with the license, it has to do with whether the code is public. You don't want the AI accidentally revealing proprietary non-public information (e.g. imagine someone had a secret API key in a private repo and copilot leaked it; that'd be a huge incident), so you don't train it on that information, regardless of what it's licensed under.

You could make a similar argument for not training on GPL code, but it's a lot easier to programmatically determine whether or not code is public than it is to programmatically determine what it's licensed under, particularly when you're training on massive amounts of unlabeled data. Not to mention it's way easier to delete an accidentally-added snippet of GPL code from a codebase than it is to "unleak" company secrets after they've been publicly revealed.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#319

Post by cmsj »

JaumeGreen wrote: post #317
uuuguaii wrote: post #107

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…

> 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 would end up providing the same end result since the original authors would be both allowed to and reasonably expected to distribute the derived work to their users as well. I might be in the wrong, but this is…

> What I get from the license is that you have to share the code with the users of your program, not anyone else.

You're correct, but it's sort of a meaningless distinction because those users are entirely within their rights under the GPL to share that code on with anyone they want, which is why we don't really see the model of "secret GPL" you describe, in the wild.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#320

Post by taink »

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'…

I agree that copyleft is more about "giving forward", and I think it's a confusion a lot of people make. Reading through the thread, I get the impression that some think as soon as one "distributes" the licensed material, original authors should get a copy. I'm extrapolating of course, but even then I feel some people would agree with that statement.

GPL, for instance, merely states that distributed sources or patches "based on" the program should be "conveyed" under the same terms. In other words, anyone who gets their hands on it will do so under the same license.

If anything, I would be worried that GitHub trained itself on publicly-available but not clearly licensed code, because then it would have no license to "use" it in any way[0]. GPL provides such a right, so there is no problem there. It would be even more worrying if the not clearly licensed code was in a private repository but I think I remember reading that private repositories were not included in the training data.

However, would you consider a black box program, of which the output can consistently produce verbatim or at the very least slightly modified copies of code from GPL code to be transformative? The problem does not lie in how the code is distributed but in how transformative the distributed code is. Not only does the same apply to any program besides AI-powered software, it applies to humans[1].

Given how unpredictable the output of an AI is, one should not be able to train itself on GPL code if it cannot reliably guarantee it will not produce infringing code.

[0]: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t... (https://archive.ph/susi0#4-license-grant-to-us)

[1]: One such example would be how Microsoft employees allegedly prevented themselves from reading refterm source code, cf. https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10462#issuecomm...

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