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Leaving GitHub for Forgejo

jorijn.com

221–230 of 380 posts

Re: Leaving GitHub for Forgejo

#221
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SourceHut sounds very close to what you describe: https://sr.ht/

I’ve had my eye on this platform. Generally like their design and ethos too. However I find their code viewer/navigation a little hard for my eye. But maybe I’m just too used to GitHub.

Sure. If you really wanted to, I think the pages are simple enough that you could add your own CSS tweaks via a basic browser plugin (or whatever is the current go-to plugin for doing this).

For me, I only use a forge's viewer/navigation for cursory glances or sharing links to others. If I need to spend any real time digging, I'll clone the repo.

Re: Leaving GitHub for Forgejo

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (...) I'm also remembering how GitHub used "all open repositories" to train their first Copilot without telling anyone. This is a silly opinion to hold, isn't it? I mean, you release projects under a license with the express purpose of freely distributing your code among anyone in the world that may have any interest whatsoever, and even allow they themselves to share it with anyone they feel fit. But you are someh…

Because there's no way the code is distributed properly according to any of the OSS licenses. In fact, it claims authorship with nonsense bylines saying the LLM wrote it.

They key issue is whether the training is considered to be fair use; but this can only be determined in court. We have some preliminary indications that it definitely can be, but also may not be, depending on four factors, but predominantly the first and fourth factor (how transformative, how it affects the market for the original works).

National Law Review covered some of those nuances last year: https://natlawreview.com/article/federal-courts-issue-first-...

US Copyright Office has a substantial document discussing each of the four factors, and making it clear this is an unanswered question, and details of the particular case will decide which way courts go. It is a prepublication version, and it's over 100 pages, but it covers the issues well, citing arguments on all sides.

https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...

Re: Leaving GitHub for Forgejo

#224

Everyone seems to be leaving GitHub, and forgetting the entire spirit of what git is in my eyes. Git was always meant to be decentralized, the problem here is that all the tooling around git was centralized to GitHub because it was a cleaner experience, they scaled nicely, and were properly maintained. I would prefer to still see mirrors on GitHub that are auto-synched because I've seen projects for years either self…

That "everyone" is just a small, vocal community if you look at the total numbers of repos on GitHub (which is still climbing)[1]

Yes, I understand that people are upset about the Copilot issues and maybe even the "frequent" outages (which usually only affect fringe parts of the site not everyone uses daily)

It's good that there are other solutions (forge, sourcehut, whatever) but most projects are still alive and very well on GitHub and my guess is that this will stay for a while.

Also, personally I have no issues with GitHub training AI on my (badly-coded and bug-ridden) code if they really want to :)

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/github/comments/1snqyj3/is_there_an...

Re: Leaving GitHub for Forgejo

#225

I'm kind of baffled why everybody is suddenly hating on github? I use it just fine. I'm actually impressed how well codex is able to interact with it. I virtually do not need to fret about git commands or managing github to respond to issues anymore. I don't see an alternative and its a bit of a stretch to expect people to follow you unless you are famous or have that audience reach already which many of us do not.

> I'm kind of baffled why everybody is suddenly hating on github? I use it just fine.

For past two weeks I haven't been really able to browse repositories; some parts will not get downloaded. Issues not appearing after creating. Pull requests missing. All kinds of issues.

Re: Leaving GitHub for Forgejo

#226

I've also heard of Tangled [0] which is decentralized and built on the AT Protocol like Bluesky but also has some genuinely useful features that GitHub has been dragging its heels over in implementing, like PR stacking, such that entire companies have sprung up to add that feature in GitHub. Has anyone tried this? [0] https://tangled.org/

They just got a big VC funding. There is still no mention about the business model. I really wonder what it will be.

Re: Leaving GitHub for Forgejo

#227
post #62

What if you don't want to self host? Who offers low feature git hosting for a small price? Something like the old $7 account before github was bought by MS? All I want is hosting and a read only web interface, plus access control in case I have collaborators. All the offerings are enterprise priced because they offer "minutes of CI", "AI assistants" and other icing on the cake.

just put gitweb and slap cloudflare in front of it

Re: Leaving GitHub for Forgejo

#228
post #34

I have also moved my git repositories to a self-hosted NUC. I have not yet bothered with a HTTP frontend to share it with the world, mostly because I don't want to provide AI scrapers with content and don't want to put the work in to block them. It's a shame that all these companies that benefited from open source have poisoned the industry like this

I use Gitea in my NUC, hardware was used and cost like 50 quids. Has been running for 3 years! If you lock it down so that it is just available in LAN and no internet, it is a solid, timeless experience.

Re: Leaving GitHub for Forgejo

#229
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a shame that all these companies that benefited from open source have poisoned the industry like this Open Source and the OSI are an industry plant. Look at who sponsors it. The monopoly hyperscaler conglomerates get free labor and use it to build the world we despise: tracking panopticons, phones we can't install things on, device attestation, browser monoculture with no adblock, etc. etc. Google made people…

Why can't others just be "Others I disagree with"? Why it has to be some grand conspiracy? I'm all for open source, most of what I do is released as MIT, almost never "Free Software", still doing the same thing since LLMs appeared, regardless of everything else. I'm a real person, have nothing to do with OSI but willing to explain my position, as long as you take it as real opinions held by a real person, instead of…

[deleted]

Re: Leaving GitHub for Forgejo

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It did so in direct violation of the licenses of the code held there as well and then sold code snippets they had no rights to and still do.

How did you draw those conclusions? They don't seem to be in line with court rulings (i.e. Anthropic), which hold that training is fair use. Code is being treated the same as any other copyrighted content that is used for training, from blog posts to PR announcements from companies and everything in between. Of course the blog posts are PR announcements have their copyright held by their authors, with no license prov…

I have written about this numerous times, so I won't repeat myself with the long form writing. Maybe I need to keep a list of comments somewhere, so I can reference them. I digress...

In short:

- GPL code requires attribution and sharing of code. Models strip license, so GPL is effectively violated.

- Source available licenses are "for your eyes" only, so training on source available code is also violates said code's licenses.

- MIT requires attribution, but forgetting it has no consequences, so it's a more gray area.

About moving from GitHub:

- Some public repositories provide visible and invisible anti-scraping protections. So it's not always that easy.

- GPL says I need to share code to the people who downloads the application itself, so I can move to cathedral model.

Moreover:

- US Government has a stance of "If we need to take permission for everything, AI industry will die". Hence, as an outsider, the court rulings have no weight in my eyes. They are taking stance to enable and not hinder the industry. If one reads Fair Use doctrine, it's very possible to rule otherwise. OpenAI's whole non-profit research arm was an instrument to circumvent Fair Use doctrine's "earn money from copyrighted works" clause and support "we only do research pinky promise" requirement of the said doctrine.

When courts said "go ahead, we're not looking", people started to torrent e-books (ahem Meta ahem) to train models or buy/cut/scan/ocr books to train their models (Anthropic).

So the situation is left murky to allow Silicon Valley to thrive. Not to protect people's blood, sweat and tears. These works are provided by peasants anyway, so why bother.

Addenda: Courts said models' outputs can't be copyrighted. So, copyrighted code gets in, non-copyrightable code gets out. It's effectively license-washing.

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