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I'm a programmer and also studied law for some time. These stories make me - once more - realize the old adage: "Possession is nine tenths of the law." Don't ho

I'm a programmer and also studied law for some time. These stories make me - once more - realize the old adage: "Possession is nine tenths of the law." Don't host that code in the cloud (or a better term, someone else's dirty bucket). What happened to developers hosting stuff on their own website!?

ghoward 5y ago
This is why I have now moved my code off of GitHub.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
tannhaeuser 5y ago
> What happened to developers hosting stuff on their own website!? Devs were hoping for stars and network effects rather than listening to those of us feeling uncomfortable taking all traffic to gh. Something like Copilot or even a coding bot was predicted two years ago already.
ralph84 5y ago
GitHub's argument isn't that you hosted your code on GitHub and therefore gave them a license to use it to train their model. GitHub's argument is they don't need a license to train their model because it's fair use. Hosting your code somewhere else doesn't prevent fair use. If you don't want your code used to train ML models, don't host it anywhere.
- rambambram 5y ago
  I get it, but that's already a legal argument. I was trying to zoom out from the unavoidable legal argumentative deadlock: if GH does not have your code hosted on their servers, it becomes way harder for 'them' to grab it and rape it. Your own domain is - of course - also out in the open, but at least you can have more control.
jefftk 5y ago
It doesn't matter where the code is hosted, just that it is publicly accessible. If developers hosted code on their own sites, someone could still scrape them and use that to train models. (The question of whether this is sufficiently transformative to count as fair use is still wide open)
- BuildTheRobots 5y ago
  > It doesn't matter where the code is hosted, just that it is publicly accessible. If developers hosted code on their own sites, someone could still scrape them and use that to train models. I'd suggest it makes it more interesting. If it's self hosted, then the hoster can choose to impose restrictions on server aceess, including no automated scraping, rather than trying to impose licensing on the code itself.
elliekelly 5y ago
Anecdata: I’m a lawyer and programmer and my clients (large financial institutions) are increasingly insisting on hosting as much on-site as possible. It costs more, it can make it difficult to select vendors/service providers, and it’s not without business continuity risks which they take steps to mitigate. But I think more and more companies, particularly those in highly regulated industries, are deciding that the benefit of controlling the data — access, security, privacy, and understanding who, exactly, it’s being shared with — outweighs the risks of someone else having that control.
- radiator 5y ago
  So some professionals will have the chance to migrate systems back to on-premises, after having migrated them from on-premises to the cloud? Interesting.

ghoward 5y ago

This is why I have now moved my code off of GitHub.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

tannhaeuser 5y ago

> What happened to developers hosting stuff on their own website!? Devs were hoping for stars and network effects rather than listening to those of us feeling uncomfortable taking all traffic to gh. Something like Copilot or even a coding bot was predicted two years ago already.

ralph84 5y ago

GitHub's argument isn't that you hosted your code on GitHub and therefore gave them a license to use it to train their model. GitHub's argument is they don't need a license to train their model because it's fair use. Hosting your code somewhere else doesn't prevent fair use. If you don't want your code used to train ML models, don't host it anywhere.

rambambram 5y ago
I get it, but that's already a legal argument. I was trying to zoom out from the unavoidable legal argumentative deadlock: if GH does not have your code hosted on their servers, it becomes way harder for 'them' to grab it and rape it. Your own domain is - of course - also out in the open, but at least you can have more control.

jefftk 5y ago

It doesn't matter where the code is hosted, just that it is publicly accessible. If developers hosted code on their own sites, someone could still scrape them and use that to train models. (The question of whether this is sufficiently transformative to count as fair use is still wide open)

BuildTheRobots 5y ago
> It doesn't matter where the code is hosted, just that it is publicly accessible. If developers hosted code on their own sites, someone could still scrape them and use that to train models. I'd suggest it makes it more interesting. If it's self hosted, then the hoster can choose to impose restrictions on server aceess, including no automated scraping, rather than trying to impose licensing on the code itself.

elliekelly 5y ago

Anecdata: I’m a lawyer and programmer and my clients (large financial institutions) are increasingly insisting on hosting as much on-site as possible. It costs more, it can make it difficult to select vendors/service providers, and it’s not without business continuity risks which they take steps to mitigate. But I think more and more companies, particularly those in highly regulated industries, are deciding that the benefit of controlling the data — access, security, privacy, and understanding who, exactly, it’s being shared with — outweighs the risks of someone else having that control.

radiator 5y ago
So some professionals will have the chance to migrate systems back to on-premises, after having migrated them from on-premises to the cloud? Interesting.