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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 h

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 data or anything like that in the public commons for a meta analysis doesn't strike me as wrong, even if the people doing it make money off of that analysis. If I scraped GitHub code and then wrote a book about common coding patterns & practices I don't think that would be wrong. I used the Brown corpus and multiple other written word corpuses (corpi?) Along with WordNet and other sources to write my thesis in Computational Linguistics Word Sense Disambiguation, later applying it to my job, which earns me money. Is this wrong? Public datasets have been used extensively for ML already. I don't see this as much different.

joe_the_user 5y ago
The difference appears when copyrighted material is repeated verbatim. And because it's obvious Github has no control over how much copyrighted material is being repeated verbatim. And that copyrighted material is intended to be used by commercial companies who copyright their own material and don't want to have their copyright challenged.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  Under US rules at least, everything automatically falls under copyright. But if the license allows full use even for commercial purposes, verbatim repetition is no different in this context than if I included it in my own new piece of software. (Of course attributions and distribution of the code & modifications would frequently be requires... with Pilot it's... potentially a gray areas on whether code lumps together with countless other software is actually modified in the traditional sense of the term, but attribution should still be an obvious requirement. And where the other license requirements are strictly required or not, I still think it would be the right thing to do for GitHub to honor the spirit of those strictures, especially considering their entire business model is based on a majority of users trusting their code to them. If they're not going to act accordingly, there's no reason someone couldn't roll their own GitLab instance, or a competitor with more respect enter the marketplace.
ghaff 5y ago
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. But it's not fundamentally different from what many programmers do all the time.
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  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.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    If the license allows commercial use, what would the GPL violation be in this case?
    - hvis 5y ago
      GPL allows commercial use. Under certain conditions.
    - jeroenhd 5y ago
      The GPL allows commercial use, provided that you ship the source code to the software bundled with the GPL3 source code you use to your customers. Publish a mobile app on any app store with a GPL3 snippet and suddenly you must provide the source code to your entire app under GPL3 terms. That in turn might violate the licenses for the other libraries you use, so mixing libraries might permanently leave you open to lawsuits from either copyright owner. The GPL also inherently violates the Apple App store guidelines, so you cannot use any GPL snippets for iOS applications you plan to publish there. There's workarounds for GPL requirements (notable the web loophole, writing applications that don't distribute binaries but generate web content instead, thereby not violating the GPL by not providing the backend source code) but even that has dangers (for example, when you include a snippet of GPL3 code in your (compiled) Javascript code).
pessimizer 5y ago
> Can't you host code on GitHub that is not "free" for commercial use? If GitHub scraped these projects then it's a problem. It did. It's spitting up the AGPL in empty files, and AGPL'd code isn't free for commercial use. It requires people who use it to make changes available under the same license.
- zmmmmm 5y ago
  That seems really dumb since they have a well formalised system for people to declare their licenses. Even if people have shown isolated incidents of it, I'm still sceptical (for example, maybe someone put AGPL headers into a project they explicitly licensed MIT in their main license file etc).
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- ineedasername 5y ago
  My non-expert reading of the AGPL seems to indicate that using AGPL code in a commercial project is find as long as you don't change it. GitHub wouldn't necessarily have needed to change it to include it in a data set, so I'm not sure there's a license violation. However the gray area is that the massive data set of which it is a part will spit out new code that has, in some way big or small, been influence by the AGPL code, which... well, I don't think that sort of use was anticipated by the terms of AGPL. I see can reasonable arguments in both directions. Personally though, I would favor an interpretation that limits GitHub's use for commercial purposes, if not for strictly licensing restrictions then at least for the spirit of these licenses. In truth, I would very much have liked GitHub to gone out big & loud with an aggressive awareness campaign asking repo owner to opt-in to the use of their code for this. Again, for pure opens source licenses I don't thing that would be required, but I still think it would be the right thing to do. And certainly less damaging to their reputation & future hesitancy for project maintainers to trust GitHub with their code. I don't think this will be a tipping point by itself, but if this behavioral pattern continues I could imagine devs big & small shifting to hosted or on-prem instances of things like GitLab.
rcxdude 5y ago
OpenAI's argument is that this is fair use, in which case the license does not apply at all (though if the court's decision hangs on certain parts of the fair use tests, especially the fourth part, what was contained in the license may have some relevance).

joe_the_user 5y ago

The difference appears when copyrighted material is repeated verbatim. And because it's obvious Github has no control over how much copyrighted material is being repeated verbatim. And that copyrighted material is intended to be used by commercial companies who copyright their own material and don't want to have their copyright challenged.

ineedasername 5y ago
Under US rules at least, everything automatically falls under copyright. But if the license allows full use even for commercial purposes, verbatim repetition is no different in this context than if I included it in my own new piece of software. (Of course attributions and distribution of the code & modifications would frequently be requires... with Pilot it's... potentially a gray areas on whether code lumps together with countless other software is actually modified in the traditional sense of the term, but attribution should still be an obvious requirement. And where the other license requirements are strictly required or not, I still think it would be the right thing to do for GitHub to honor the spirit of those strictures, especially considering their entire business model is based on a majority of users trusting their code to them. If they're not going to act accordingly, there's no reason someone couldn't roll their own GitLab instance, or a competitor with more respect enter the marketplace.

ghaff 5y ago

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. But it's not fundamentally different from what many programmers do all the time.

jeroenhd 5y ago
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.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  If the license allows commercial use, what would the GPL violation be in this case?
  - hvis 5y ago
    GPL allows commercial use. Under certain conditions.
  - jeroenhd 5y ago
    The GPL allows commercial use, provided that you ship the source code to the software bundled with the GPL3 source code you use to your customers. Publish a mobile app on any app store with a GPL3 snippet and suddenly you must provide the source code to your entire app under GPL3 terms. That in turn might violate the licenses for the other libraries you use, so mixing libraries might permanently leave you open to lawsuits from either copyright owner. The GPL also inherently violates the Apple App store guidelines, so you cannot use any GPL snippets for iOS applications you plan to publish there. There's workarounds for GPL requirements (notable the web loophole, writing applications that don't distribute binaries but generate web content instead, thereby not violating the GPL by not providing the backend source code) but even that has dangers (for example, when you include a snippet of GPL3 code in your (compiled) Javascript code).

pessimizer 5y ago

> Can't you host code on GitHub that is not "free" for commercial use? If GitHub scraped these projects then it's a problem. It did. It's spitting up the AGPL in empty files, and AGPL'd code isn't free for commercial use. It requires people who use it to make changes available under the same license.

zmmmmm 5y ago
That seems really dumb since they have a well formalised system for people to declare their licenses. Even if people have shown isolated incidents of it, I'm still sceptical (for example, maybe someone put AGPL headers into a project they explicitly licensed MIT in their main license file etc).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
ineedasername 5y ago
My non-expert reading of the AGPL seems to indicate that using AGPL code in a commercial project is find as long as you don't change it. GitHub wouldn't necessarily have needed to change it to include it in a data set, so I'm not sure there's a license violation. However the gray area is that the massive data set of which it is a part will spit out new code that has, in some way big or small, been influence by the AGPL code, which... well, I don't think that sort of use was anticipated by the terms of AGPL. I see can reasonable arguments in both directions. Personally though, I would favor an interpretation that limits GitHub's use for commercial purposes, if not for strictly licensing restrictions then at least for the spirit of these licenses. In truth, I would very much have liked GitHub to gone out big & loud with an aggressive awareness campaign asking repo owner to opt-in to the use of their code for this. Again, for pure opens source licenses I don't thing that would be required, but I still think it would be the right thing to do. And certainly less damaging to their reputation & future hesitancy for project maintainers to trust GitHub with their code. I don't think this will be a tipping point by itself, but if this behavioral pattern continues I could imagine devs big & small shifting to hosted or on-prem instances of things like GitLab.

rcxdude 5y ago

OpenAI's argument is that this is fair use, in which case the license does not apply at all (though if the court's decision hangs on certain parts of the fair use tests, especially the fourth part, what was contained in the license may have some relevance).