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Give up GitHub: The time has come

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Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#551

Post by CRConrad »

naikrovek wrote: post #320
josephcsible wrote: post #122

> If it is, as you claim, permissible to train the model (and allow users to generate code based on that model) on any code whatsoever and not be bound by any licensing terms, why did you choose to only train Copilot's model on FOSS? For example, why are your Microsoft Windows and Office codebases not in your training set? This is my favorite question about Copilot ever.

I want to know what stuff you guys are putting in public GitHub FOSS repos that you don't want replicated in any way... I also want to know why people think their code is so special that no one else could have ever come up with it independently. Each and every opponent of Copilot is the best developer ever, I guess? That said, I don't understand the choice to use GPL for any reason, so maybe I'm not equipped to under…

Second, shorter reply:

> I don't understand the choice to use GPL for any reason

No, you just don't understand the GPL.

Or, for some reason, pretend not to.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#552

Post by CRConrad »

hinkley wrote: post #431
UmbertoNoEco wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how you direct the question to the people putting their code out in their open and not to Microsoft. What is so special about Clippy et al?

Skipped right over the question on the table and asked a whole bunch of passive aggressive questions. Truly a classic.

You mean skipped right over the moronic statement thinly veiled as a question on the table? As if it deserved better.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#553

Post by CRConrad »

xtracto wrote: post #312
karamanolev wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They explicitly listed the reasons they think it's awful. My personal grievances with Windows align more or less with theirs and while I wouldn't go as far as to say it's awful, I'd use something certainly stronger than "annoyance". Specifically, clear anti-user choices that exceed by far being "annoying": * Making it exceedingly difficult or impossible to use the OS without logging in with a Microsoft account. * For…

>Making it exceedingly difficult or impossible to use the OS without logging in with a Microsoft account This is hilarious. I recently got a new laptop that has window$ 11. After setting it up with a Non Microsoft email (which required some good fight), I tries to install some random app from the Microsoft store, but got a "something went wrong please try again" on the first screen. It's pathetic. I haven't used Wind…

Windows 7 was the last tolerable version.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#554

Post by CRConrad »

seadan83 wrote: post #176

As a leader of a FOSS project that is on github, and migrated off of sourceforge because SVN and email patches were not scaling - I'm a bit confused by this article. Co-pilot has issues, ergo github is going the way of sourceforge, and so now we must abandon github? Do I have that reasoning correct? We need to: - migrate the bug queue - have all links in commit history break - application integration with githib for…

> I'm a bit confused by this article.

Obviously.

> Co-pilot has issues, ergo github is going the way of sourceforge, and so now we must abandon github? Do I have that reasoning correct?

No, you don't. If you had actually read the whole article[1], you would have noticed that they also listed several other issues which far predate Copilot.

___

[1]: You need to correct this part of the guidelines, dang. Some times -- like here -- the injunction against saying this is just fucking wrong.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#555

Post by CRConrad »

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…

> Where does this end? You write a license that your GPL code can only be re-hosted on non-GitHub hosts?

AFAICS you don't even have to: GitHub reserves the right to use uploaded code to "improve their services" (in some unspecified way). The GPL doesn't grant that right -- i.e. the right to grant Microsoft that right -- to any license holder, so anyone else but the copyright holder will infringe on their copyright by uploading it.

> But I don't care, sorry, I'm not interested.

If you've ever uploaded, or are planning to ever upload, anything containing code written by anyone other than yourself under a FOSS license to GitHub, you probably ought to be interested.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#556

Post by CRConrad »

bioemerl wrote: post #163
jeltz wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No idea at that point. If the code had a license that forbid reupload you could ask GitHub to remove it. Otherwise that's the price of open source, you don't get to choose.

> If the code had a license that forbid reupload you could ask GitHub to remove it.

Licenses don't need to forbid re-upload generally to be incompatible with GitHub. Given that uploading to GitHub, according to someone quoted on page 1 of this discussion, grants GitHub the right to use that code to "improve their service" (whatever that means -- maybe Copilot?), not explicitly granting that right to them, or the right for someone else to grant it to them, is enough to make them not allow uploading to GitHub.

So that should be more like: "If the code had a license that didn't specifically allow Microsoft to use it to 'improve the GitHub service' you could order GitHub to remove it."

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#557

Post by CRConrad »

ShamelessC wrote: post #319
JoshTriplett wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't hold for licenses like MIT, BSD, or Apache-2.0 either, all of which require giving credit. You personally might not care; many people do.

That's true. I use MIT myself (although I don't care if people cite me). I guess this just all seems rather activist to me but people aren't seeing the big picture; our jobs as programmers are about to change in a very big way. It won't be long before more competition enters the space (e.g. Salesforce and Amazon) and ultimately it won't matter if this model saw some GPL/MIT code because the next one will work twice a…

> I guess this just all seems rather activist to me

So? Is "activist" supposed to carry a negative connotation, or what?

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#558

Post by CRConrad »

rmbyrro wrote: post #286
jrm4 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is absolutely a need for moral panic if, like me, you believe that code and industry quality of product is more important than onboarding more people into the profession. I can't think of a worse idea than subconsciously letting the idea "By default, the way we are supposed store and write code is by putting it in the hands of a deeply centralized third party that will exploit you and owes you nothing" just sor…

> you believe that code and industry quality of product is more important than onboarding more people into the profession Perhaps a bit of a stretch? Does the fact that new devs don't know Git fully necessarily mean the quality of code will decrease? I mean, compared with the new devs knowing Git fully...

> Does the fact that new devs don't know Git fully...

That's not the problem. The problem is that they don't know what git IS; they think that GitHub is git.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#559

Post by CRConrad »

laserlight wrote: post #259
brundolf wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's fair to frame this as specific to GitHub, or even as a thing to wring hands over. New devs - especially those coming from bootcamps (I say this without judgement) - mostly start with practical skills. Industry-standard ways to just get things done. That's how you get a job, that's how you get off the ground. This goes beyond source-control; languages/frameworks, tooling, etc. You enter the territor…

How difficult is it to teach “Git runs on everyone’s own machine. GitHub and GitLab run their own Git for their users to connect to and push code.”

Apparently overwhelmingly.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#560

Post by ShamelessC »

CRConrad wrote: post #557
ShamelessC wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true. I use MIT myself (although I don't care if people cite me). I guess this just all seems rather activist to me but people aren't seeing the big picture; our jobs as programmers are about to change in a very big way. It won't be long before more competition enters the space (e.g. Salesforce and Amazon) and ultimately it won't matter if this model saw some GPL/MIT code because the next one will work twice a…

> I guess this just all seems rather activist to me So? Is "activist" supposed to carry a negative connotation, or what?

Perhaps I should have said idealistic. I mean I've seen several people make demands like they're somehow already in a courtroom with Microsoft. No mention made of the fact that this is likely covered under fair use. If it isn't, then basically every deep neural net trained on a web dataset is in violation. This means open works like from University at Heidelberg (Latent Diffusion, VQGAN) or EleutherAI (GPT-J) would be impossible.

Like, maybe you could all get together and learn how machine learning works and train your own clean model? That feels far more positive and in the spirit of progress to me. I guess from my point of view it's clear - no laws will save you from the next wave of large language models. The weights are trivially distributed meaning once it's trained it's more just a fact of life we all have to deal with. So making demands when you have basically zero leverage rather than admitting defeat and working within the new constraints of progress.

I just feel like it's an inherently philosophical position and people are acting like code theft hasn't been common practice for the history of all software.

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