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Give up GitHub: The time has come

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Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#141

Post by evouga »

no_wizard wrote: post #19

You can either try and sway people purely philosophically as the software freedom conservancy is trying to do here, but I think ultimately in today's world, you need more, most of the time, you need to show that: - what you opposed negatively affects your target audience in real ways that matter, for their career, livelihood, or some other means - Show that continuing to be apart of an old model will be damaging in t…

GitHub has a formidable monopoly on source code hosting, thanks to network effects alone. I don't think there's a realistic case you can make today along the lines of your first bullet point that could convince a career-minded developer to switch away.

Direct competition against GitHub is barely worth contemplating; the practical path I see for replacing GitHub must be more indirect:

1. Some nonprofit foundation spins up a GitHub alternative focused on transparency and strong data privacy protections. This alternative has only a small fraction of GitHub's most crucial features.

2. A major FOSS project---which values the principles of the new alternative over the practical benefits of GitHub---switches away from GitHub.

3. Satellite projects reexamine their use of GitHub and slowly start switching over as well. The new hosting service incrementally adds features in response to demands from the growing userbase.

Steps 1 and especially 2 will require motivation by philosophical arguments, even if I agree that the linked article's execution wasn't perfect.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#142

Post by nyanpasu64 »

bastardoperator wrote: post #117
towelrod wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should not have to opt out. GitHub should have to respect my license. I already said they can use my code, as long as they keep an attribution intact (via a BSD license, for example) GitHub is taking my code and ignoring the license. I don’t understand why anyone would think that is ok.

No, you're ignoring what you agreed to when you accepted the terms of service. GitHub can display your code, and YOU granted them that license by accepting their terms. I find the only people making these OSS claims haven't used copilot and tend to lack any real contributions to OSS. What you're describing is just simply not the case for 99.9 percent of the code snippets being produced/generated based on data from Gi…

I have used Copilot in its free phase, and have made substantial OSS contributions to various projects as well as shepherding my own projects (a few of which have attained a degree of success). Building an AI model off the community's code and selling the model (and code generated by rearranging statements and patterns found in the training data) back to the community is odious.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#143

Post by bioemerl »

wiz21c wrote: post #118
UglyToad wrote: post #110

Where does this end? You write a license that your GPL code can only be re-hosted on non-GitHub hosts? git still exists, if I'm unhappy with GitHub I can just add a new origin (sourcehut, gitea, gitlab, self-hosting, etc) and push there. But I'm perfectly happy with GitHub and I'm fine if their ML thingy makes money off my code, I get free actions runners, a nice UI, pull-requests, etc, into the bargain, not bad. Lik…

> But I'm perfectly happy with GitHub and I'm fine if their ML thingy makes money off my code, I get free actions runners, a nice UI, pull-requests, etc, into the bargain, not bad. As an indivdual you can certainly think so. But as a community we must balance how much advantages do we get from GitHub versus how much advantages it gets from us. Considering that GitHub will probably make millions with copilot, then it…

> Therefore, money should be shared.

Isn't this sort of the expectation of these free services? They provide a service to you for free, and in exchange they are able to collect data from you, store it in a database, and do things with it.

I fully expected GitHub to do something like this (minus Enterprise repos that pay big money), and it's why I stopped using them. I instead use gitbucket, which is a free and open source self hosted thing.

I also expect GitLab to do something similar. It is as they say in the crypto world.

Not your wallet, not your crypto.

Not your source control server? Not your code. Legally? Might be, but that doesn't matter. Do you have lawyers?

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#144

Post by qayxc »

u801e wrote: post #120
joshstrange wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In addition many features of GitLab don't work at all or work much less well if you turn off JavaScript. I feel like the venn diagram of people who complain about JS being required and of people who have never had to code up a web /app/ that users expect rich interactions without a page-reload is just a circle.

What about websites that won't even render static text when javascript is disabled. For example, any website that references sinclairstoryline for javascript will not render anything at all until you give permission to run scripts from both the website and that external host. If I'm just reading static text on a web page, theres'a absolutely no reason why I should need javascript to just read it.

> If I'm just reading static text on a web page, theres'a absolutely no reason why I should need javascript to just read it.

100% true if the site is privately funded. In most other cases JS is required for ad integration and analytics.

I don't like it, but I understand that funding is required and ads are the simplest way to get there without getting into the whole micro-payment and paid subscription mess.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#145

Post by [deleted] »

NoraCodes wrote: post #95
vadiml wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If i read the code published on github and later i do not infringe on any license. If later i'm hired to implement some function chances are that i'll produce code which is similar to what i've learned from github. Or if somebody asks me on how to implement some function and i can respond: Hey that and that project on github already doing it, just use it, i'm not infringing on any license. Now, replace "I" in the abo…

Copilot is not a person.

[deleted]

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#146

Post by zimbatm »

UglyToad wrote: post #110

Where does this end? You write a license that your GPL code can only be re-hosted on non-GitHub hosts? git still exists, if I'm unhappy with GitHub I can just add a new origin (sourcehut, gitea, gitlab, self-hosting, etc) and push there. But I'm perfectly happy with GitHub and I'm fine if their ML thingy makes money off my code, I get free actions runners, a nice UI, pull-requests, etc, into the bargain, not bad. Lik…

It was the same with SourceForge. It worked great (for its time). You get stuff for free. It's convenient.

And then slowly they started changing policy, closing the source, adding ads to the platform, .. then one day you realized you've locked yourself into their ecosystem. It's a bunch of work to move away. It will be worse with Github since they bolted so many things on top of Git.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#147

Post by teruakohatu »

brabel wrote: post #130
QuadrupleA wrote: post #121

Would love to see Fossil get wider adoption: https://www.fossil-scm.org/ Single 6mb executable with a version control system, web server, bug database, forums, import/export/sync with git, repo browser, much saner CLI than git, etc. Been using it for 2+ years for all my projects and love it.

They wrote the whole thing in C?! Wow, I really admire people who can turn C into useful, complex projects... I was trying to write C the other day and holy shit, it's incredibly hard to write anything that involves more than a couple of files... it just has almost no abstractions and one small slip and you've got a segfault that terminates your program without trace :D I gave up very quickly and been learning Zig no…

> Wow, I really admire people who can turn C into useful, complex project

If you use any open source operating systems a significant portion of software you interact with are C (kernel, shell, utilities, sqlite etc).

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#148

Post by jeltz »

bioemerl wrote: post #143
wiz21c wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I'm perfectly happy with GitHub and I'm fine if their ML thingy makes money off my code, I get free actions runners, a nice UI, pull-requests, etc, into the bargain, not bad. As an indivdual you can certainly think so. But as a community we must balance how much advantages do we get from GitHub versus how much advantages it gets from us. Considering that GitHub will probably make millions with copilot, then it…

> Therefore, money should be shared. Isn't this sort of the expectation of these free services? They provide a service to you for free, and in exchange they are able to collect data from you, store it in a database, and do things with it. I fully expected GitHub to do something like this (minus Enterprise repos that pay big money), and it's why I stopped using them. I instead use gitbucket, which is a free and open s…

But I have written code which is hosted on GitHub which other people have uploaded and I have signed no agreement to let them do so. Does this mean all open source projects older than GitHub need to stop using it?

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#149

Post by RunningDroid »

eulers_secret wrote: post #129
NoGravitas wrote: post #47

I publish my public FOSS work on a self-hosted Gitea. I don't allow account creation, and people can send me pull requests by email. That said, I think one thing (other than interface and brand loyalty) that keeps FOSS projects on GitHub is network effects. You can reasonably expect to search it and find the projects you're looking for, and your account lets you use the issue tracker and pull requests on other projec…

IMO it kinda speaks loudly that Gitea's development happens on github ! There's a reason that's the case, and it's likely one of the reasons I should just use github as well; despite being morally opposed to what they're doing WRT copilot.

> IMO it kinda speaks loudly that Gitea's development happens on github!

There's a bug for that: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1029

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#150

Post by inetknght »

i_like_apis wrote: post #126

I disagree with all of their reasons for disliking GitHub. * They make money from Co-Pilot? Great! * They sell software to ICE? Good. Why wouldn’t they? I’m not interested in anti-immigration-enforcement politics. * They’re a closed-source for-profit company? Great! That’s why their product is high quality.

> They make money from Co-Pilot? Great!

OK let me take your projects and make money from them and not give you anything in return, not even credit.

> They sell software to ICE? Good. Why wouldn’t they? I’m not interested in anti-immigration-enforcement politics.

ICE policies aside, you should be interested in immigration politics because they're important to people and businesses. Apathy is a bad thing here.

> They’re a closed-source for-profit company? Great! That’s why their product is high quality.

hahahaha, there are plenty of open-source not-for-profit companies with high quality products and many many many more closed-source for-profit companies with terrible products. See also Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office.

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