How on earth was Microsoft allowed to buy such a critical piece of tech infrastructure?
"Critical"? "Infrastructure"? What do you think Github is?
Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features
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Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features
#32How on earth was Microsoft allowed to buy such a critical piece of tech infrastructure?
GitHub isn’t critical infrastructure, it’s only real USP is network effects.
Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features
#33I read this article and then looked at my Github and a few other projects and found no issues created by Copilot. As someone else has said they need to be triggered manually, so therefore it's the same sort of problem as with the Curl project bug bounty, where people would be spamming with automatically LLM generated fictional problems. In that case because there's a potential for money to be made, and in the Github…
Same experience. Does anyone have info on this discrepancy in observations?
I read this article after it was shared on social media by the Codeberg.org account so I though it was a PR piece, as it doesn't mention self hosting at all, just moving to another hosted platform.
Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features
#34Is this actually a real problem? Note it says "forced Copilot features" and > the most popular community discussion in the past 12 months has been a request for a way to block Copilot, the company's AI service, from generating issues and pull requests in code repositories. but Microsoft doesn't automatically make these issues and PRs. Users have to trigger it. I mean, I do think you should be able to block the `copil…
> Is this actually a real problem?
I mean if Microsoft is "training" on your source code without consent (and potentially violating licenses) , that is a huge problem.
> I also checked the Rust compiler which is obviously waaaay more popular and it appears to have had zero copilot PRs
How do you asess whether some PR was made by an AI(like the user did)?
Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features
#35People have been voluntarily letting Microsoft host their code for years now. And before that they posted their open source code to a centralized site that wasn't open source. This is one of those things where of course it was going to happen. GitHub was VC funded, they were going to either exit to a big company or try to become one. Eventually the bill was going to come due and everyone knew this. You can choose to…
Wasn't GitHub initially bootstrapped?
Yes, there was a couple of years we all believed GitHub would eventually turn into a open platform made by and for FOSS, but then they took on VC investments after some years and the dream went into hiding again.
Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features
#36How on earth was Microsoft allowed to buy such a critical piece of tech infrastructure?
"Critical"? "Infrastructure"? What do you think Github is?
Among other things, a CDN. If it were to take a sustained outage, lots of important online systems would stop working shortly thereafter. And I’m not talking about developer tools; bigger sites/apps than you think are reliant on GH being up. Stupid to do that, sure, but widespread.
Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
While Microsoft is certainly to blame, GP is also right that the problem wouldn’t exist if people hadn’t continued en masse to have their code hosted on a centralized proprietary and (since 2012) VC-funded platform in the first place. As an aside, I don’t really see GitHub as a whole as a community. It’s a go-to place with network effects, but network effects doesn’t by itself imply “community”.
Yeah, I said that first thing. It's right but it misses the point. Being VC backed isn't a deciding factor for adopting a forge. It's the community that drives adoption. > I don’t really see GitHub as a whole as a community. It's basically a social network on top of a source code forge. You have a profile that is individually identifiable, you can open issues and contribute to discussions on pull requests. All this c…
> Being VC backed isn't a deciding factor for adopting a forge. It's the community that drives adoption.
OP is arguing that VC should be a deciding factor. The “community” wouldn’t exist if people had made that a deciding factor.
A social network is not a community. It may contain many communities. GitHub has communities around projects. But GitHub as a whole isn’t a community.
Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features
#38People have been voluntarily letting Microsoft host their code for years now. And before that they posted their open source code to a centralized site that wasn't open source. This is one of those things where of course it was going to happen. GitHub was VC funded, they were going to either exit to a big company or try to become one. Eventually the bill was going to come due and everyone knew this. You can choose to…
If I remember initially GitHub (before MS) was free for open source and pay for everyone else. It wasn’t an entirely new idea (source forge?) but it use git which was rising in popularity.
I think GitHub added the “pull request” as a really useful add on to git and that really made it take off.
Oddly I used selfhosted git at an academic institution. I liked it because it was set up to use “hooks” https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Hooks after check ins. This became much harder when we were pushed off to a commercial host ( gitlab a git hub competitor)
Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features
#39Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features
#40How on earth was Microsoft allowed to buy such a critical piece of tech infrastructure?
Was GitHub really critical at time of purchase? Or has Microsoft turned it into critical infrastructure?
> Was GitHub really critical at time of purchase?
Do you think they would have bought it otherwise? Same for NPM, they got bought for huge sums of money because they were "critical" already.