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> By the end of the year, we will have grown our index to include every open source repository with more than 1 star on GitHub and GitLab (that’s 5M+ repos). A
by bArray 5y ago
> By the end of the year, we will have grown our index to include every open source repository with more than 1 star on GitHub and GitLab (that’s 5M+ repos).
And what if your source code has a license that says "Do as you like, as long as you're not Sourcegraph"? I'm not entirely sold on the legalities of what they are doing...
With search engines you have your robots file and many other ways to opt out of indexing, I wonder what Sourcegraph have. My guess is nothing.
- jka 5y agoAre you thinking along the lines of GitHub co-pilot with this concern, out of interest? Or are there other scenarios where you think people would want their code to be public, but not indexed/crawled?
- 542458 5y agoLicense files (and copyright) aren’t omnipotent. I understand why you might feel the ethics lie in a different direction, but the established legal precedent is that parsing and building search indexes or neural nets is generally fair game regardless of what the copyright holder wants. You mentioned robots.txt - there’s no legal enforcement behind that either. Notably, the Internet Archive bot ignores it completely.
- electroly 5y ago> "Do as you like, as long as you're not Sourcegraph" It wouldn't matter that this provision is in the license that you offer to your users, because when you post your code publicly on GitHub you agree to their TOS which includes a section called "License Grant to Other Users". This grants all GitHub users, including Sourcegraph, the right to "use, display, and perform" your code. Even if this were not true, it has been claimed (I'm not qualified to judge whether it's correct) that fair use covers this type of usage even if there is no license.