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Gitlab Duo

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Re: Gitlab Duo

#141
post #131
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're concerned, you should switch the license of your code, not really where you host it. As long as your license allows LLM/AI models to train on your code, why would you be mad that it does?

Almost none of the common licenses allow this, because at the very least they have an attribution requirement. Licenses are being ignored.

Attribution doesn’t apply on training. We’d all be screwed otherwise, it would mean you’d have to attribute everything you learned while reading open source codes to every codebase you read every time you write code.

Re: Gitlab Duo

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You grant us and our legal successors the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time A couple things - you agree github can do it, ostensbly taking archives for backups sure, but in this case it's to distribute out to some 3rd party and explicitly to be locked in a vault with no business purpose…

I agree that Github has rights to parse any uploaded code, and any code with a license that would allow a human to study and learn from it does, in my opinion, also allow a machine to study and learn from it. Granted, the machine has to learn to not directly plagiarize in the same manner humans are not allowed to when they use acquired knowledge - unless the license allows it of course - but the act of studying mater…

There's two issues here still, IMHO:

1) The LLM owners really can't guarantee that it won't directly plagiarize without attribution or licensing. Your code may contain a unique algorithm or method for solving something, and when someone asks the right question, your code may simply be the only answer it knows to give.

2) While the code being used as training input was open source and visible to the public to learn from, the models being built often aren't. It seems unethical to train from public data yet keep the resulting weights private and charge for access to use the trained weights.

Re: Gitlab Duo

#143
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that Github has rights to parse any uploaded code, and any code with a license that would allow a human to study and learn from it does, in my opinion, also allow a machine to study and learn from it. Granted, the machine has to learn to not directly plagiarize in the same manner humans are not allowed to when they use acquired knowledge - unless the license allows it of course - but the act of studying mater…

There's two issues here still, IMHO: 1) The LLM owners really can't guarantee that it won't directly plagiarize without attribution or licensing. Your code may contain a unique algorithm or method for solving something, and when someone asks the right question, your code may simply be the only answer it knows to give. 2) While the code being used as training input was open source and visible to the public to learn fr…

For the first aspect, neither can a human, and it's incredibly hard to decide if something is plagiarized or fair-use/inspiration. There are several things to consider:

1) These tools are generally used in a pair-programming fashion, and in that function, the output can be considered similar to when you ask a coworker on Slack and they paste you a snippet, or if you browse github and read someone else's implementation (without having the LICENSE text within your field of view at all times). A possible violation would then only occurs once the snippets in question are included into your code-base and distributed in ways that violate the original license.

2) One could argue that sharing the snippet with you was a form of redistribution, but I would not consider this to apply if a human did it and would therefore not apply it to machines either, and I do not think that is what people generally consider redistribution of an open source project. GPL technically has a clause second-hand violations, but I do not think that one holds.

It should also be noted that licenses like MIT only require the copyright and permissions notice included in substantial portions of the program, and so smaller snippets are always fine. Humans also do not bother attributing smaller copy-paste blocks - we'd run out of storage linking to all the stackoverflow answers!

3) The issue gets a bit hairier when the machine reproduces large/important portions of projects with no hint as to its source, license or ways to do proper attribution, but even then I'd consider the violation to occur only if included verbatim into a project which is then redistributed under incompatible terms.

4) Even when code is largely identical, it generally only an issue if the code is a unique invention, not if the code trivially follows for a skilled individual of the trade. That's a principle in the practice of many laws, including patent law.

For the second aspect, I do not see any importance to the fact that the trained model is not public. A person studying open-source projects do not upload a brain dump afterwards, and others only directly benefit from their experience (their "weights") if they decide to teach the subject. Nor is every project they write afterwards with their knowledge necessarily open-source, only being public if they want to make them public. Licenses generally do not restrict private or internal usage, including modification and derivative works. It is redistribution they trigger on (with some catches for things like AGPL).

(I would of course like the model to be public for the betterment of mankind, but that's different from the legal aspect of it.)

Re: Gitlab Duo

#144
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also gitea is a much more lightweight option and can use sqlite for db. Much easier to deploy on a rpi Worth mentioning Forgejo as well ( https://forgejo.org ), which is Codeberg's fork of Gitea. Same features and as lightweight as Gitea. Hard-forked a couple of months ago after some transparency concerns from the new parent company that owns Gitea now.

Isn't it just the same thing with a different name? Why is it worth mentioning at this point in time?

Because functionality isn’t the only thing everyone cares about, I use Forgejo for ideological reasons and so do probably most people since it’s mainly an ideological fork.

Why would it not be worth mentioning? The question is quite strange.

Re: Gitlab Duo

#145
post #141
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost none of the common licenses allow this, because at the very least they have an attribution requirement. Licenses are being ignored.

Attribution doesn’t apply on training. We’d all be screwed otherwise, it would mean you’d have to attribute everything you learned while reading open source codes to every codebase you read every time you write code.

Either attribute or don't use it, that's what the license says.

"Doesn't apply" is just opinion right now until settled in court, hopefully the other way.

I'm curious to hear why you think so though? Any other license terms you routinely ignore?

Re: Gitlab Duo

#146
post #144
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it just the same thing with a different name? Why is it worth mentioning at this point in time?

Because functionality isn’t the only thing everyone cares about, I use Forgejo for ideological reasons and so do probably most people since it’s mainly an ideological fork. Why would it not be worth mentioning? The question is quite strange.

The project and community might be worthwhile, but as long as the product is the exact same, I don't see what there is to mention. I'm excited to see what the future holds though, more attention in this space sure sounds good.

Unless my information is out of date?

Re: Gitlab Duo

#147

We've tried this out for some weeks at my company and concluded it's not ready yet. As someone else mentioned they don't use state of the art models: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/ai_features.html#language-mo... (though they are working on using Claude 3) The completion plugin for the JetBrain IDEs (pycharm tested) appear to be very barebones, and judging by the results - does not seem to take advantage of the cont…

Upgraded the plugin today. Using the new chat sidepanel just work forever without any results when trying the "explain" and "generate test" commands.

Re: Gitlab Duo

#148
post #27

From that page: > Will my code be used for training AI models? > GitLab does not train generative AI models based on private (non-public) data. The vendors we work with also do not train models based on private data. So they will steal your code if it is public, ignoring license. Understood.

I’ve been feeling more and more that we should reconsider open source licenses to protect our rights as authors from LLM vendors. I’m not against them basing their models on my work. I do have reservations on them generating their models on my work and creating derivative works without respecting the license. It’s why I’ve started to use the MIT license less and less and have adopted various from the GPL family. Mode…

One simple solution is just don't open source. A lot of folks forget that many open source licenses were produced to be "business friendly" to encourage participation by the private sector. The private sector, however, has largely done the bare minimum unless profit was involved. Then they'd either co-opt the project or fork it to their own ends in pursuit of profit with minimal returns to the original project WRT their gains.

That's a long way of saying, for what open source is and was, a lot of projects are mislicensed when juxtaposed to their goals and needs. It's okay to sell your software, it's okay to be "source available", it's okay to be entirely proprietary.

Re: Gitlab Duo

#149
post #129
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not sure how lightweight any of these are, but https://gitolite.com/gitolite/ just needs git and ssh deployed. And it works like a charm.

For a single author, if you have a server with SSH, you don't need Gitolite at all. The lack of anonymous public access is often a deal-breaker though.

For a single author you don't necessarily need any server at all. A cloud directory or zip files work well.

But gitolite is so easy to setup & maintain, it's not a big difference and for r/w-access management within teams, it's priceless.

I guess one could even hack anonymous access with "PermitEmptyPasswords yes" and "AuthenticationMethods none"

Re: Gitlab Duo

#150
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand, software heritage doesn't make derivatives or remove the attached license.

They can't be bothered to allow opt-outs ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39771318 ) or even attempt to check if code they're archiving is freely licensed ( https://www.softwareheritage.org/faq/#25_Is_the_code_checked... ) It's like Common Crawl, another non-commerical mass scraping project just benevolently stealing creations for "AI" companies.

Their content policy says you can:

> To request the removal of a content from the Software Heritage archive, you must file a formal request containing all of the following informations:

> (...)

> Please send your request by e-mail to takedown@softwareheritage.org

https://www.softwareheritage.org/legal/content-policy/

The HN thread you posted even shows that they contacted the forge's admin week in advance to check for possible concerns.

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