Saying Goodbye to GitHub • Hacker News Board

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#341

Post by samtho » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 2:57 PM UTC

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…

> That's the spirit here and trying to argue around that with technicalities is disingenuous.

First, I am not a lawyer, but don't licenses exist precisely for their technicalities? This is not like a law on the books in which case we can consider the "Letter and Spirit of the law" because we know in what context in which it was written in/for. With a written license however, someone chooses to adopt a license and accepts those terms from an authorship point-of-view.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#342

Post by sureglymop » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 2:58 PM UTC

EarlKing wrote: post #167

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'…

Co-pilot spits back protected expressions, not novel expressions based on ideas harvested from code. It is therefore violating the licenses of numerous free and open source projects. The author is right to be pissed.

You are correct. The problem is that the GitHub Terms of Service probably (guessing) have a clause which invalidates your license if you upload your code there. And that's exactly why you shouldn't use GitHub.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#343

Post by tanseydavid » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 2:59 PM UTC

OP: "it's a stochastic parrot" GPT-5: "I know you are, so what am I"

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#344

Post by theonlybutlet » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 2:59 PM UTC

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.

By the same logic. If I read your code and learnt something from it. Do I need to open source all my thoughts?

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#345

Post by jacquesm » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 3:03 PM UTC

ethbr0 wrote: post #333

jacquesm wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since open source licenses all allow people to use the code for "whatever" That's not what they allow for, and copyright being a 'right' it allows you to pass those rights on to others and to retain some for yourself. If not explicitly passed on the right still rests with the original author, plenty of precedent for that.

To take an example: someone who used MIT licensed code but doesn't reproduce the license. Therefore isn't following the terms of the copyright grant, ergo doesn't have a license for use, ergo is violating copyright. Now what does that look like when I take 100 different open source licenses, including MIT, put them in a GPT blender, and then productize my output without following any of the licenses? ... makes you th…

I can't wait for this stuff to be legislated to establish once and for all what the legal status is.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#346

Post by EthanHeilman » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 3:07 PM UTC

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'…

It would be interesting to have Free Software License that requires that any thing which ingests the source code must be Free Software running on Free Hardware. If you train a model on such inputs, your model would need to be Free software and all the hardware the model runs on would need to be Free Hardware. This would create a massive incentivize to either not use such software in your model or to use Free Software and Free Hardware.

Taken to its logical conclusion, you could add the notion of Free Humans are legally bound to only produce Free Ideas. One could imagine this functioning like sort of monastic vow of charity or chastity. "Vow of silence on producing anything which is not Free (as in freedom)."

Would you take such a vow if offered 100,000 USD/year for the rest of your life (adjusted for inflation)? I would.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#347

Post by stonemetal12 » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 3:22 PM UTC

ilyt wrote: post #261

tm-guimaraes wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's the spirit here not really. All this Free Software movement started by something really similar to "right to repair", a firmware bug in a printer that was proprietary software. Free Software is about being in control of software you use. The spirit was never "contribute back to GNU", the spirit was always "if you take GNU software, you can't make it non-free". Those GNU devs at the time just wanted a good an…

> All this Free Software movement started by something really similar to "right to repair", a firmware bug in a printer that was proprietary software. Free Software is about being in control of software you use. The spirit was never "contribute back to GNU", the spirit was always "if you take GNU software, you can't make it non-free". Those GNU devs at the time just wanted a good and actually free/libre OS, that woul…

It is a pretty big distinction with different end results in practice. Look at Android, you can use the source in a "right to repair" manner but Google doesn't take patches so you can't give back even if you wanted to.

The same goes for Apple and Google's OSS browser. The source is there, but there is more or less no way to give back, and they certainly don't.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#348

Post by em-bee » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 3:23 PM UTC

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.

their ToS trumps your code's license

wait, what?

do you have more details on this? what rights does the ToS claim that would violate an existing license?

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#349

Post by layer8 » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 3:25 PM UTC

eviks wrote: post #267

layer8 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright could be an issue. Also, they may not agree that the GitHub interface is “good”.

I'm not sure © blocks, see Codeberg that is pretty close. Have you seen an example of an interface that is better?

I haven’t really looked around, but the GitHub interface is rather bad as far as I’m concerned.

I’m not sure how Codeberg would fare if GitHub sued them for copying their design. I guess GitHub doesn’t really care as long as they’re the king of the hill.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#350

Post by cxr » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 3:29 PM UTC

ye-olde-sysrq wrote: post #329

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 wonder if the GPLv4 will be coming out soon with an anti-AI-training clause (unless your output model and its outputs are also GPLv4, of course).

People keep bringing this up. It's not as straightforward as a clause that says "you can't use this to train AI" (which is what I suspect many people think).

Licensing operates on a continuum of permissiveness. They can only relax the restrictions that you as a creator are given by default. You can't write a copyright license that adds them. You could write a legal instrument that compels and prohibits certain behavior(s), but at that point you're talking about a contract. (And there's no way to coerce anyone to agree with the contract.)

Harry Potter has even more restrictions than the GPL or any other open source license. It's "All Rights Reserved—it enjoys the maximum protections that a work can. And yet it would still be possible feed it into an AI model, even if all of Rowling, Bloomsbury, and Scholastic didn't want you to. They don't get a say in that. Nor do open source software developers in their works which selectively abandon some of the protections that Rowling reserves for herself and her business partners.

The only real viable path to achieve this using an IP license alone would be a React PATENTS-like termination clause—if your company engages in any kind of AI training that uses this project as an input, then your license to make copies (including distributing modified copies) under the ordinary terms are revoked, along with revoking permission for a huge swathe of other free/open source software owned by a bunch of other signatories, too. This is, of course, contingent upon the ability to freely copy and modify a given set of works being appealing enough to get people to abstain from the lure of building AI models and offering services based on them.