GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#201

Post by tekknik » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 2:31 PM UTC

Engineering-MD wrote: post #134

oaiey wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is zero rationale why Microsoft could not do it without buying GitHub. Hell, they could have trained the model from GitLab or Bitbucket public repos. They need developer mindshare and they lost a lot of developers in the 2000s. Buying GitHub (and being involved in 100s of projects) brings this mindset of Microsoft as a developer company back to developers. Like as an advertisement platform/branding for some nov…

It was a bit of a tongue in cheek comment. It’s very unlikely they were even planning this when they bought GitHub. While you’re completely right about their rationale, a lot of people were at the time concerned about the acquisition, and it feels now a bit short sighted to burn all the good will they have generated by an act like this which undermines open source.

I don’t even think most people care about open source code. What if they’re reading private repos as well? The only option to escape this is to leave github. Which I’m kinda considering even with all the work involved.

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#202

Post by licenseauth » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 5:15 PM UTC

iliekcomputers wrote: post #3

If you open-sourced code and allowed it to be used for commercial purposes, I don't see the point of being pissy about Github using it, I'm saying this as someone who's written quite a lot of MIT code. (And charging for a product which adds value to your developer experience and needs money to be run is not a bad thing)

> quite a lot of MIT code

Where is this MIT licensed codes of yours, because it definitely is not on your github.

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#203

Post by Abishek_Muthian » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 5:58 PM UTC

iliekcomputers wrote: post #3

If you open-sourced code and allowed it to be used for commercial purposes, I don't see the point of being pissy about Github using it, I'm saying this as someone who's written quite a lot of MIT code. (And charging for a product which adds value to your developer experience and needs money to be run is not a bad thing)

Has GitHub agreed that it scraps based on license of the repository?

If so then what about private repositories with a permissible license but not been made public for what ever reason.

What about those projects whose dependencies has permissible license but main repo doesn't? Can GitHub just go oops!

I think the point that so much confusion exists regarding their product & possible violation of user's trust is a valid reason to be pissy about.

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#204

Post by lal » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 11:01 PM UTC

krapp wrote: post #179

thinkingemote wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And once again RMS was proven right.

How would the GPL have prevented this, exactly? More explicitly, how would a license that gives everyone the right to copy, modify and redistribute source code for any purpose without compensation or attribution have prevented Github from building a tool that copies, modifies and redistributes source code without compensation or attribution?

You don't know how the GPL works. The GPL explicitly requires attribution. I don't understand what you thought you were saying. The GPL places strict requirements on the licensing of derivative works. You don't know how the GPL works.

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#205

Post by jrm4 » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 3:35 AM UTC

jefftk wrote: post #133

jrm4 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once again, Stallman (will have been) right. Github/Microsoft is going to take your code, and then cut off your access to it. This is what the GPL was designed to fight, so they're going to try it this way instead. Those who do not learn history yadda yadda.

How does this cut off our access to the code?

Someone's GPL'd code will "strongly inspire" someone elses proprietary (or otherwise "controlled") code down the line, and there won't be much recourse.

Remember, the GPL isn't fundamentally about "enforcing licenses," it's a tool that reverses the usual power of copyright for a higher goal of "software freedom."

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#206

Post by kuschku » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 8:04 AM UTC

anothernewdude wrote: post #180

kuschku wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you grant each User of GitHub a nonexclusive, worldwide license to […] reproduce Your Content […] as permitted through GitHub' functionality If you upload code to GitHub, you grant them (and every GitHub user) a license to do exactly what Copilot does. This ToS change happened 2017, and I actually had to get approval from all contributors of my projects to accept to the changed ToS: https://github.com/justjanne/Qua…

> If you upload code to GitHub, you grant them (and every GitHub user) a license to do exactly what Copilot does. You can upload code to GitHub without the ability to grant such a license, or is github now only for primary copyright holders?

> or is github now only for primary copyright holders?

That is how I interpreted the 2017 ToS change: You can only upload code to GitHub if you’re the primary copyright holder, or the code was already on GitHub to begin with (which is only an issue if the primary repository of some project is another git host, e.g. gitlab).

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#207

Post by superkuh » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 1:25 AM UTC

blibble wrote: post #93

superkuh wrote: post #92

If you're hosting at the free github service, or even paid, github did not scrape your code. They just accessed the information on the hardware they owned. HTTP wouldn't have to be involved at all. They could just look at the disks. Additionally, "The third-party doctrine is a United States legal doctrine that holds that people who voluntarily give information to third parties—such as banks, phone companies, internet…

believe it or not there's more countries in the world than the United States > "The third-party doctrine is a United States legal doctrine that holds that people who voluntarily give information to third parties—such as banks, phone companies, internet service providers (ISPs), and e-mail servers—have "no reasonable expectation of privacy." this is definitely not the case for 100% of the rest of the world

Github isn't incorporated and mostly centered in the rest of the world.

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#208

Post by a1369209993 » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 1:49 AM UTC

fsckboy wrote: post #176

insulanus wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the software industry has been moving towards less problematic and more permissive licences [sic] ... less "problematic" for who, exactly? That is conveniently left out.

not only is "problematic" problematic, so is "permissive". more permissive for whom? because the GPL is the most permissive license for users of the code: GPL guarantees, they're permitted to see the source.

> so is "permissive".

The proper term is "pushover"[0][1].

0: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.html#sm...

1: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-compatibility.html

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#209

Post by a1369209993 » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 2:16 AM UTC

ineedasername wrote: post #145

jeroenhd wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If large company violated my open source license, I'd certainly have a problem with it. Use my code all you want, but follow the basic rules. There's entire websites dedicated to GPL violations; people do care.

If the license allows commercial use, what would the GPL violation be in this case?

> what would the GPL violation be in this case?

Since it incorporates GPL source code, the entire copilot neural network needs to distributed under the GPL and - since it is a non-source form of the software - it's entire corresponding source (namely, the entire training dataset it was generated from) needs to be made available, also under the GPL, to anyone it's distributed to. (AGPL is a bit^Wlot more clear about the fact that remote interaction over a network is a kind of distribution, though.)

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#210

Post by greyhair » Wed, Jul 07, 2021, 9:10 PM UTC

Engineering-MD wrote: post #112

blibble wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People are probably angry because this is yet another case of a big multinational corporation abusing unclear or difficult to enforce legislation for profit. it's worse than that: it's Microsoft trying to completely undermine the concept of open source meanwhile: they're unaffected as their high-value proprietary code remains private and doesn't train the model

Finally the angle for Microsoft buying GitHub becomes clear.

I think the rational for buying it was they were the single largest user of it, and were concerned about funding stability.

Does anyone have the numbers before they bought github, I saw them once, don't remember the values, just remember being shocked at what percentage of the total github code base was Microsoft. I had no idea they were using it at all.