Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 212 posts

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

#71

Post by pdonis »

dopaminefasting wrote: post #18
SamWhited wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you write MIT code you expect them not to strip your license out in derivative works. This is exactly what license are for and GitHub is blatantly violating it while people applaud.

Maybe read the MIT license before you grab the pitchforks: "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all COPIES OR SUBSTANTIAL PORTIONS of the Software." Reusing a snippet doesn't require reproducing the MIT license. People who publish MIT software know they're basically giving their code out with basically no strings attached. However, GitHub should be careful with the GPL variety.

The problem here is that a person using this automated tool is not being given the required information in order to decide whether the code they are re-using is a "substantial portion" of the software it's taken from; in fact, they aren't even being told they're re-using existing code at all.

This does not relieve the person using the code of the responsibility to make that determination, so anyone who is re-using code shown to them by this automated tool is doing it without having fulfilled their responsibility under the license. The fact that they don't know they are doing this, because the tool is not telling them, doesn't change that.

> People who publish MIT software know they're basically giving their code out with basically no strings attached.

No, they aren't. The license has terms. Using an automated tool that doesn't tell you when you are re-using existing licensed code, or whether your re-use is within the terms of the license, doesn't mean you can just ignore the license. It means you're re-using code without knowing whether or not you're violating a license.

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

#73

Post by jeroenhd »

ghaff wrote: post #53
ineedasername wrote: post #38

Can't you host code on GitHub that is not "free" for commercial use? If GitHub scraped these projects then it's a problem. Otherwise, Into honestly trying to have a conversation on this to understand the objections because I haven't made up my mind but struggle to see the problem. So pease consider the following: if the code was not encumbered by restrictions I don't see an obvious problem with this. Using code or da…

If an individual hypothetically painstakingly searched through GitHub to see how others wrote an API call and copy-pasted, almost no one would have a problem with that even if they didn't attribute every little code snippet. But some are bringing out the pitchforks because ML can basically do that painstaking search (yes, I know it's not literally a search) so efficiently that it's actually (maybe) useful as a tool.…

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.

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

#74

Post by chx »

dopaminefasting wrote: post #18
SamWhited wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you write MIT code you expect them not to strip your license out in derivative works. This is exactly what license are for and GitHub is blatantly violating it while people applaud.

Maybe read the MIT license before you grab the pitchforks: "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all COPIES OR SUBSTANTIAL PORTIONS of the Software." Reusing a snippet doesn't require reproducing the MIT license. People who publish MIT software know they're basically giving their code out with basically no strings attached. However, GitHub should be careful with the GPL variety.

> Reusing a snippet doesn't require reproducing the MIT license.

In light of Google v. Oracle going as far as the Supreme Court I find your confidence in this quite astonishing.

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

#75

Post by blibble »

hmfrh wrote: post #15
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)

> If you open-sourced code and allowed it to be used for commercial purposes Uploading it to Github does not transfer ownership or imply allowances for any use. If you upload it without a license it is a copyright violation to copy the code. Even with an MIT license it is a copyright violation to copy the code without attribution. > I don't see the point of being pissy about Github using it, I'm saying this as someon…

> 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

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

#78

Post by brutal_chaos_ »

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)

Let's say your code on GitHub is not opensourced. Do we know it wasn't used for training?

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

#79

Post by kenniskrag »

hmfrh wrote: post #15
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)

> If you open-sourced code and allowed it to be used for commercial purposes Uploading it to Github does not transfer ownership or imply allowances for any use. If you upload it without a license it is a copyright violation to copy the code. Even with an MIT license it is a copyright violation to copy the code without attribution. > I don't see the point of being pissy about Github using it, I'm saying this as someon…

is copy not allowed by theirs terms of service? I read something about that it is needed for e.g. forking feature. But it was years ago, when I created the account.

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

#80

Post by nomercy400 »

ghaff wrote: post #53
ineedasername wrote: post #38

Can't you host code on GitHub that is not "free" for commercial use? If GitHub scraped these projects then it's a problem. Otherwise, Into honestly trying to have a conversation on this to understand the objections because I haven't made up my mind but struggle to see the problem. So pease consider the following: if the code was not encumbered by restrictions I don't see an obvious problem with this. Using code or da…

If an individual hypothetically painstakingly searched through GitHub to see how others wrote an API call and copy-pasted, almost no one would have a problem with that even if they didn't attribute every little code snippet. But some are bringing out the pitchforks because ML can basically do that painstaking search (yes, I know it's not literally a search) so efficiently that it's actually (maybe) useful as a tool.…

Unless, it is searching through repositories which someone paid to keep private.

What if that private key you accidentally committed, pushed, removed and pushed last week to your private repo is now showing up in everybody's Copilot?

Post reply on HN