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Give up GitHub: The time has come

• AndyKelley 4y ago
  Dear SFConservancy, You need to pay more attention to GitHub Sponsors. Not sure how you could write this article and then not even mention it. You're asking people to walk away from a giant pile of money without even addressing it?
  • TkTech 4y ago
    I'll continue to use GitHub pro for the next year, at least, simply because GitHub just sent me $720CAD through GitHub sponsors. The self-host movement is important, and I self host a lot of things (including gitea), but it still costs you time, especially when you have to deal with external users (like reputable email servers for gitea invites). If staying on GitHub is painless and _makes me money_, why would I switch?
• nequo 4y ago
  The statement mentions CodeBerg as a Gitea-based non-profit alternative. A discussion about it 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22795930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22795930
• potatototoo99 4y ago
  Wait, copilot spews out code that was licensed outside of public domain or equivalent? How is that at all legal?
• ordiel 4y ago
  When Github anounced its impending acquisition by Microsoft unlike many others who just flooded gitlab, I took it as a sign to just go ahead and host my personal git repo. Sure it takes some more effort and it "hurts my pocket" yet.... hosting a git repository on a raspberry pi costs no much more than having a lightbulb on permanently and having a cron job to back it up and save it somewhere once a month its not too much maintainance, my code is as free and/or private as I want it to be now and I actually think I gain so much more control of what I get to do with it instead of being limited to be a hostage of making my code opensource in order to get full feature capabilities. And no, I have not switched (yet) to a non propietary git system, I am using Bitbucket (yes on a Raspberry PI) since it has plenty of already built in integrations, sadly they ended their offer of self hosted for small teams. It used to cost 10 bucks to get a licence to host your server for 10 users... lord most OSS is a lone effort or surelly under 10 guys, i am sure they would have continued that offer given they had more small customers. Anyhow there are plenty good alternatives as Gitea that someone might use, and that would be the true intent of git as a decentralized platform... nontheless while software is one of the best paid professions nowdays it is full of cheap (greedy) people
• UmbertoNoEco 4y ago
  I had my suspicions but reading this comment thread I am now 100% sure that FAANGS and the likes have active PR firms working on HN threads. Naive to not have realized that before I know.
• rickspencer3 4y ago
  This is why I prefer to use permissible license for my own software. I just don't need the drama of worrying about what people are doing with my code after I write it. Living in a world where you think a company is evil for training ML models on code that is published for anyone to read on the internet anyway because it violates the license you used just sounds exhausting.
• togaen 4y ago
  Isn’t copilot just a pure AI version of stackoverflow?
• cvoss 4y ago
  While I appreciate the earnest defense of FOSS and the, in all fairness, totally warranted suspicion of Microsoft, given its history, I found the attitude of this article to be very sour and, actually, in bad faith. Let me address the three questions which they posed to MS: > 1. What case law, if any, did you rely on in Microsoft & GitHub's public claim, stated by GitHub's (then) CEO, that: “(1) training ML systems on public data is fair use, (2) the output belongs to the operator, just like with a compiler”? In the interest of transparency and respect to the FOSS community, please also provide the community with your full legal analysis on why you believe that these statements are true. I mean, I'd be floored if any corporate lawyer let anyone at [large company] answer this kind of question outside of an actual lawsuit. They are essentially asking the opposing team's lawyers to do all this work for them, for free. This is followed by an "obvious[ly]" correct (I'm being ironic) interpretation of the refusal to answer: that MS is wrong but just won't admit it. But go back and re-read the question. The question was architected to produce this impression if it wasn't answered. That's a sign of a bad faith question, rather than a question with intent to learn the answer. > 2. 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? Other commenters have discussed this one already. There is a perfectly reasonable and legitimate explanation here: The do not want to do anything that remotely risks exposing trade secrets, and that's a separate concern from potentially accidentally violating a license. Suppose the model was trained on all these public repos + MS's private repos. Someone else can come along and train their own model on the public code; now they have two code generators whose outputs can be compared to reveal secret information about MS's training set. This time, the article guesses well at the answer: MS cares more about itself than others. Sure. Why would it be expected not to? > 3. Can you provide a list of licenses, including names of copyright holders and/or names of Git repositories, that were in the training set used for Copilot? If not, why are you withholding this information from the community? I think this question is bad faith too. It starts by asking "can you". Then, if the answer is "no, we can't", reinterprets the answer as "no, we won't" ("withholding" is an intentional act). It is disingenuous to imply that someone who cannot do something is, therefore, intentionally refusing to do so. In the analysis of the lack of response, the article (finally) admits that it is speculating wildly, backpaddles on the implied claim that MS is refusing to provide this information, and instead takes a different approach: MS scientists can't answer because they are not good scientists. But wait, here's the kicker: > ... so they don't actually know the answer to whose copyrights they infringed and when and how. Busted! The authors have essentially demonstrated the question is in bad faith by suggesting that the answer to the question, "Whose data did you use?", is the same as the answer to the question, "Whose copyright did you violate?", which is a logical connection made possible only by the underlying presupposition that MS is totally incorrect in its assertion about fair use in question 1. The framing of all these questions suggests to me that the authors were already firmly convinced of their guesses as to the answers/non-answers _at the time of posing the questions_. If they actually waited for a whole year expecting a response, that's on them. I'm with MS on the decision not to engage here, even if I share all these qualms about Copilot.
• Aeolun 4y ago
  Ugh, is this the next big thing? Ragging on Github and Copilot due to some nebulous claims of freedom? I think I’ve seen 3 articles about this in just the past week…
  • CRConrad 4y ago
    What's "nebulous" about having your chosen license for your project ignored – in practice, rescinded – when it's uploaded to GitHub by someone who may or may not be you?
    • adli89 4y ago
      Then find that someone and deal with them.
      • CRConrad 4y ago
        There's two parties to that: the uploader, and GitHub. I've already found one of them.
• Brendinooo 4y ago
  Legit question: why do people feel locked in to GitHub? It’s very easy to push a git repo to a new place, and GitLab has way more features out of the box.
• the_black_hand 4y ago
  Some of these questions are unfair. What case law, if any, did you rely on in Microsoft & GitHub's public claim, stated by GitHub's (then) CEO? Doesn't Google crawl the entire web? How is crawling code different? Copilot is essentially a more intelligent search engine. The only difference is that people want their websites to be searchable and rise to the top of Google they benefit from the increased traffic. Legally I don't see the difference. As Copilot gets more developed, it may become desirable to have your API at the top of Copilot just like search, and this can help drive traffic to FOSS projects. After all, why would a creator not want their FOSS project to be easier to find/use? why did you choose to only train Copilot's model on FOSS and not on Windows/Office? Code from Azure and tons of other Microsoft projects is in the training set. Windows and Office are not FOSS and not on GitHub. Obviously it would be a huge security risk to train on OS code. Can you provide a list of licenses, including names of copyright holders and/or names of Git repositories, that were in the training set used for Copilot? Again unfair; this is a gotcha type question. There's all kind of code on GitHub with so many different types of licenses. there's bound to be some gray areas and code that inadvertently made it's way into the model. No lawyer would ever expose themselves to that kind of liability. The bigger issues I see here are copilot is not free but uses free software and that understandably make FOSS community uncomfortable. However, the Copilot models are incredibly expensive to run interact and Microsoft has to cover the bill. Would it be unethical if Google charged you a monthly fee? Arguable not, because it does already in the form of ads. What Microsoft needs to do is have an opt-out standard like the robots.txt file or noindex meta tag. The problem with GitHub is, unlike websites on the web, not everyone uses Github public repos with the express purpose of having them be easily accessible to the public. Another issues is attribution of snippets is a nightmare, but one could argue that devs do with stackoverflow all the time.
• Beegle 4y ago
  Codeberg.com
• jimnotgym 4y ago
  Will co-pilot users get snippets of my crappy code as well? Is publishing bad solutions to github a way to sabotage co-pilot?
• ElijahLynn 4y ago
  They are not wrong.
• b1nj0y 4y ago
  I think an easy and efficient way to prevent FOSS code to be used to train the model is to update the licenses or create a new license that forbids such a training.
• rambojazz 4y ago
  notabug.org has worked fine for me so far
• NicoleJO 4y ago
  FWIW, you can help send OpenAI and Microsoft a strong message by filing an official complaint with the FTC, BBB, CA State Attorney General, San Francisco DA office & FBI IP Theft division. There is currently an open investigation case at the Better Business Bureau (filed by my self), but OpenAi refuses to participate. I.E. OpenAI refuses to defend its business practices in front of a government entity.
• sshine 4y ago
  I've given up GitHub for the startup I joined. We're self-hosting Gitea and run CI with Drone. My main concern was exactly Copilot. The concern is mostly principal. I don't hate Microsoft like I did when I was younger. I think VSCode is a great editor. I still think GitHub is the best social network I know. But I've quit every other social network. But when your values don't align with an organisation's, you will eventually run into conflicts of interest. I still push changes to open-source projects that I host on GitHub, but I don't create new ones. The latest project I started runs in a local git directory that will get pushed to a self-hosted Gitea. When necessary, I'm seriously considering contributing to Gitea to make this transition easier for others. Gitea is an ~100MB self-hosted binary that mimics GitHub, runs its own SSH server, and it looks GREAT!
• indoorskier 4y ago
  This GitHub Copilot thing is pretty polarizing. According to one of the expert papers they sollicited, it's unlikely MSFT/GitHub is breaking any copyright laws. What they're doing does feel icky, and they could have mitigated a few concerns by a) making the inventory of the full training set public and b) at least attempt to attribute if there is a direct copy (which by their own admission happens about 0.1% of the time). These seem very simple steps they could take, and takes away the "shady behavior" argument.
  • Klathmon 4y ago
    >at least attempt to attribute if there is a direct copy (which by their own admission happens about 0.1% of the time). IIRC they just block that suggestion if they detect it's a copy now
    • pas 4y ago
      what constitutes a direct copy? do they upload the generated code and use it as input for a full text search?
    • dotnet00 4y ago
      More specifically it's an option, the VSCode Copilot extension asks you to configure it and takes you to a GitHub page where you can choose what happens if a suggestion is a direct copy.
• uberman 4y ago
  The impetus for the post is apparently "co-pilot" being a commercial service. I have no dog in this fight, just giving an overview of their main argument.
  • JoshTriplett 4y ago
    They have a variety of good reasons at https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/ https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/ , not just Copilot. Another critical reason is that GitHub is proprietary and has a pile of services with lock-in that (unlike git) aren't easy to move elsewhere. Some people depend on GitHub for their livelihood (through GitHub Sponsors). Some people's software integrates tightly with GitHub bots, or Actions, or issues, or project management. Everything other than the code itself is incredibly difficult to port over to another service.
  • happymellon 4y ago
    The main point is that it's a commercial service that doesn't respect other people's licences. Previously it was free and the noises that GitHub had given made it sound like it wasn't finished. Turns out it was.
    • skybrian 4y ago
      It seems like a legal grey area because for the most part what CoPilot is doing seems like it should be a transformative use [1] and you don't need a license for that. But apparently sometimes CoPilot will spit out other people's code verbatim, so I wouldn't use it. Not worth the risk. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use
      • happymellon 4y ago
        Oh completely. It should be, but its also a black box which they refuse to discuss. You don't know me, but it's totally fine to drink this this mysterious blue liquid. I pinky promise it isn't toilet cleaner.
      • 4y ago
• Georgelemental 4y ago
  • happymellon 4y ago
    What is it with Americans and their dismissal of other people's concerns as always being "politics". It totally does break licencing laws, just because Americans think they can change the terms of an agreement and relicense your code because you didn't remove it doesn't make that legal.
    • Georgelemental 4y ago
      I haven't looked into this extensively or tried Copilot myself, so I might be completely wrong about this. But from what I understand, the code Copilot generates is generally different enough from the source data that it shouldn't be an issue. In a sense, Copilot reading lots of code on Github to train a code-writing model is analogous to a human reading lots of code on GitHub and learning from some of the design patterns they see—as long as the output is not too similar to the input, it should be fine.
      • shrimp_emoji 4y ago
        But we never had humans who could read so much code and "learn" so much. :p Our old system's rules and logical conclusions, taken up a level, now make us uncomfortable.
      • tessierashpool 4y ago
        code output is unrelated to the issue. the issue is if GitHub hosts your code with an open source license that does not allow for-profit reuse without concomitant sharing, like the GPL, they will incorporate that code into their product in violation of the license, and claim the license doesn’t apply because the code isn’t code but merely text. they built their business on precise and detailed articulations of consent and its boundaries, but disregarded all of that, post-acquisition, because Microsoft has enough lawyers that they think they can get away with it. so, for the subcommunities and creators who put their work on GitHub in the context of these very specific and fine-grained articulations of consent, this may be theft and is certainly betrayal.
• travisgriggs 4y ago
  > For its part, Git was designed specifically to make software development distributed without a centralized site. Just yesterday I had to explain the basic premise/history of Git to a young intern. I had asked him if he was using Git to manage his little pet project the company gave him to play with. “No”, he replied, he didn’t know what the company’s policy was to posting code in public on GitHub. As I explained to him that “git init” was all he needed, no GitHub or even no repository on our local GitLab was necessary, his eyes grew wide: “But how does that work??” I’ve had to explain this same thing to multiple novice devs of various ages. It baffles me. I consider it one of the greatest ironies of software development today. It’s like explaining to people that they could just talk to each other using a thousand means, instead of having to communicate by netcasting at each other through some shared social media platform.
  • pabs3 4y ago
    Are you saying they use GitHub (via the web editor?) but have never heard of Git? or don't know how Git works? or just don't know the Git CLI? or something else?
    • lvncelot 4y ago
      I think many a junior just never initialized a repository, and 'git clone' is what they've used to "get a repository". So I would forgive them for thinking that a remote is needed for having a repository on their drive.
      • kertoip_1 4y ago
        IMO the issue here is just that people think of git as it was something like SVN where you need to have some kind of external server to host project. Which isn't surprising as most of the time (when you cooperate with others) you do exactly that: push changes to one server. Idea of decentralization and independent copies of repositories may not be easy to grasp for newbe, because it's really technical concept.
        • 4y ago
• carapace 4y ago
  Many have. I'm pretty happy using (and paying for) sr.ht. How do you get the bulk of the users, for whom convenience and features seem to be the primary motivators, to quit?
• johnnypangs 4y ago
  What are peoples opinions on gitlab? It wasn’t mentioned in this article, I’m wondering if it was a willful omission.
  • cybrox 4y ago
    I do really like GitLab, I use it at work daily. But they manage to change and sometimes break the UI in every update and it just gets more and more bloated every day. - At least that's what it feels like.
  • mhfs 4y ago
    It's mentioned a couple of times in the article as well as in https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/ https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/
    • remram 4y ago
      Why does that page exist and why is it linked from the article, given that https://giveupgithub.org https://giveupgithub.org also exists?
  • pabs3 4y ago
    GitLab is mentioned on the advocacy page https://giveupgithub.org/ https://giveupgithub.org/. GitLab is an open-core business, which means there is a permissively licensed FOSS version and a proprietary version. The gitlab.com website uses the proprietary version. In addition many features of GitLab don't work at all or work much less well if you turn off JavaScript. They have swayed a lot of ostensibly FOSS, copyleft-leaning and privacy/security-centric projects to use it, despite the business model and license.
    • joshstrange 4y ago
      > In addition many features of GitLab don't work at all or work much less well if you turn off JavaScript. I feel like the venn diagram of people who complain about JS being required and of people who have never had to code up a web /app/ that users expect rich interactions without a page-reload is just a circle.
• williamcotton 4y ago
  From what I can tell Copilot passes the Abstract-Filter-Compare test as well as the earlier idea/expression dichotomy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Compari...
• rgrmrts 4y ago
  Does Github give users a toggle to opt-out of being in the copilot training dataset? I feel like that would be a decent compromise for folks not down with their code being used in copilot.
  • tessierashpool 4y ago
    a nice, easy compromise they could have proposed and implemented quite some time ago.
  • gnufied 4y ago
    Given Git is distributed (or most source control as a matter of fact today is) - even if you stopped pushing your code to Github, does it stop Copilot from pulling code from sources like gitlab.gnome.org, kernel.org, gitlab.kde.org etc? I think underlying discussion should be about licensing, not about website to which you are pushing open source code to. Because that can be easily worked around.
    • sreevisakh 4y ago
      There is a hidden problem with licensing here. Developers are giving Github the permission to use the code with a different license [1]. The clause sounds broad enough for them to justify training copilot with it. This allows them to disregard the license with which the project is published. The developers don't have the protection of a FOSS license anymore when you host there. [1] https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-of-service#4-license-grant-to-us https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...
      • blibble 4y ago
        I don't see anything in that licence that would allow it to be used as a corpus for machine learning most likely they're relying on fair use, which would apply regardless of where it's hosted
  • towelrod 4y ago
    I should not have to opt out. GitHub should have to respect my license. I already said they can use my code, as long as they keep an attribution intact (via a BSD license, for example) GitHub is taking my code and ignoring the license. I don’t understand why anyone would think that is ok.
• no_wizard 4y ago
  You can either try and sway people purely philosophically as the software freedom conservancy is trying to do here, but I think ultimately in today's world, you need more, most of the time, you need to show that: - what you opposed negatively affects your target audience in real ways that matter, for their career, livelihood, or some other means - Show that continuing to be apart of an old model will be damaging in the long term - Also importantly, the thing you are referring people to do needs to be seamless. For instance, they mention SourceHut, and I sure hope SourceHut has all the core features and ease of use of GitHub, because if not, you are likely already going to lose in this conversation to most Without factoring these things, its great to point out issues, and rightfully they should, but its not going to mean much in terms of action
  • earljman 4y ago
    > sway people purely philosophically yeah these same types of purely philosophical arguments have led me to move away from services like DropBox and Google Drive at my own expense. Lost too many hours trying to find the “we do things the right way” alternative—when it comes down to it, if it works well and keeps the friction low, mf’s can have their bag
  • evouga 4y ago
    GitHub has a formidable monopoly on source code hosting, thanks to network effects alone. I don't think there's a realistic case you can make today along the lines of your first bullet point that could convince a career-minded developer to switch away. Direct competition against GitHub is barely worth contemplating; the practical path I see for replacing GitHub must be more indirect: 1. Some nonprofit foundation spins up a GitHub alternative focused on transparency and strong data privacy protections. This alternative has only a small fraction of GitHub's most crucial features. 2. A major FOSS project---which values the principles of the new alternative over the practical benefits of GitHub---switches away from GitHub. 3. Satellite projects reexamine their use of GitHub and slowly start switching over as well. The new hosting service incrementally adds features in response to demands from the growing userbase. Steps 1 and especially 2 will require motivation by philosophical arguments, even if I agree that the linked article's execution wasn't perfect.
• outside1234 4y ago
  "Open source zealot gets angry that there is something that works better than the pure open source version and shoots off foot to spite arm."
  • josephcsible 4y ago
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/hillennevins/2021/11/24/the-parable-of-the-turkey/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/hillennevins/2021/11/24/the-par... You're only better off using GitHub today in the same sense that a turkey being fattened up for Thanksgiving is better off today than one living in the wild.
• dmos62 4y ago
  The writing is a problem. It's a call to action, it's a history lesson, it's an opinion piece. And, it's a mess. This is not The New Yorker: I want to know the gist of what you have to say in the first paragraph, and I want intro and outro to be good summaries. Bonus points for a structure that let's me surveil the finer points easily.
  • RoddaWallPro 4y ago
    Agreed. They use the word "problematic". Any time I see someone using that word, I close the tab instantly to avoid the brain damage that would result from me reading the rest of the piece. The word is meaningless and cowardly. Say what you think. Quit tap dancing around the conversation.
    • NoraCodes 4y ago
      > The word is meaningless and cowardly. It literally just means "has problems."
      • enriquto 4y ago
        ...which doesn't mean anything at all (unless you are quoting firefly, of course).
      • SftwrSvior81 4y ago
        And by not at least naming one of the problems, the author is being cowardly and/or lazy. It's like describing a reviewed item as "good". It conveys no information other than "I like it". The word "problematic" does the same thing here. It signals that the author doesn't like something but doesn't tell us anything about why. In other words, it's fucking useless.
        • NoraCodes 4y ago
          I would express this as "vague," at worst, not "useless and cowardly." What is "cowardly" about it?
• parentheses 4y ago
  GitHub is a business and currently provides free storage and a pretty nice interface to it. It’s easy to say “our rights are being stripped away” but the view that businesses should operate like non profits or government services with the common good in mind is ludicrous!
  • nequo 4y ago
    > the view that businesses should operate like non profits or government services I don’t think that that is what is being asked here. Even if GitHub didn’t violate license terms, it would have ways to make money.
  • cybrox 4y ago
    These are the immediate "products" GitHub provides, however, I would argue it provides a lot more. GitHub provides a place for people to easily collaborate on FOSS software. It has helped millions of people getting into software development or into their first FOSS project by lowering the barrier of entry significantly. Can you imagine how many people would start contributing to FOSS early in their career if they had to deal with mailing lists, patch sending, multiple git remotes, rebasing, etc. all at once just to start providing a small contribution? - Probably not as many. I don't support everything GitHub does and I do see CodePilot as problematic but the article opens with "Those who forget history often inadvertently repeat it.". - You know what has screwed us over a lot in recent history? Cancelling something/someone without thinking it through first. Oh the irony.
    • natefinch 4y ago
      I definitely never contributed to open source before github was around.
    • winReInstall 4y ago
    • SftwrSvior81 4y ago
      You are right about the benefits GitHub provides to the FOSS community but I don't think that was ever the stated goal of this company. Their goal is to make profit, not foster FOSS, so we shouldn't be surprised when they make decisions that benefit their bottom line.
• NoGravitas 4y ago
  I publish my public FOSS work on a self-hosted Gitea. I don't allow account creation, and people can send me pull requests by email. That said, I think one thing (other than interface and brand loyalty) that keeps FOSS projects on GitHub is network effects. You can reasonably expect to search it and find the projects you're looking for, and your account lets you use the issue tracker and pull requests on other projects. I think forges are unnecessary in general, but to wean people off of GitHub, FOSS forges like Gitea need to federate, so that you can search the whole space of public federated forges, and an account on one lets you open issues and pull requests on another. They seem to be making slow but steady progress on this at Gitea, maybe at other FOSS forges, too.
  • mappu 4y ago
    A possible middle ground here is to allow GitHub OAuth2 logins to your Gitea instance - then at least GitHub users can join in your project without too much friction.
  • ptman 4y ago
    Yes! Federation is so important. Federation for issues or issue triage on something other than Gitea would probably be important. Better start self hosting gitea right now. And you can do it for free. I think the best option is oracle cloud, or does someone know how well it works on fly.io? https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/ https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/
  • cybrox 4y ago
    > people can send me pull requests by email. Great, you already lost half of them.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • NoGravitas 4y ago
      Generally the ones I don't mind losing. If anyone can't figure out how to send a git pull request or patchset by email, I'm happy for them to email me with questions on how to, which I will answer as best I can.
• ccbccccbbcccbb 4y ago
  It is 4 years and $7.5B too late to worry about github.
• blibble 4y ago
  if you're worried about copilot: isn't the problem is that copyright law (apparently) allows them to do it? if you move everything to gitlab/self-hosted there's nothing stopping them spending 5 minutes querying the bing index and feeding it every repo they find
  • rst 4y ago
    Well, they're asserting copyright law allows them to do it. It's not clear how well that would hold up in court against a well-funded lawsuit -- but that would require someone whose code got regurgitated substantially intact by Copilot, who also had the resources to manage the suit.
  • sreevisakh 4y ago
    Copying off Github and copying off another host is not quite the same. I explained it twice on this thread already. So I'm leaving a link here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31937705 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31937705
• PhantomBKB 4y ago
• cratermoon 4y ago
  Embrace, extend, and extinguish is still alive.
• UglyToad 4y ago
  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. Like knock yourself out working out if the "monkey selfie" Supreme Court case law applies to copilot or not, what jurisdictions it covers, etc. But I don't care, sorry, I'm not interested.
  • CRConrad 4y ago
    > 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.
  • wiz21c 4y ago
    > 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. As an indivdual you can certainly think so. But as a community we must balance how much advantages do we get from GitHub versus how much advantages it gets from us. Considering that GitHub will probably make millions with copilot, then it is fair to say that a big part of that success comes from the quality of the code we collectively put one. Therefore, money should be shared. And the first thing to do is to ask Microsoft : how much money do you make on us ? And the only possible way to get an honest answer is to make sure the management of GitHub is done jointly by MSFT and the community. I don't think this is going to happen anytime soon. So I'm seriously considering getting out.
    • 4y ago
• wly_cdgr 4y ago
  I have no considered opinion on the GitHub thing in general, but Copilot depresses me. Any tool that makes you more productive at the cost of taking away the pleasure of figuring it out on your own bores and depresses me.
  • shadowfox 4y ago
    > Any tool that makes you more productive at the cost of taking away the pleasure of figuring it out on your own bores and depresses me I mean, you don't have to use these tools yourself, particularly since you have to pay for it and therefore there is no "it is free" allure. While I understand what you are saying about the pleasure of figuring things out yourself (and do enjoy that feeling myself), I don't feel that the mere existence of the tool affects me that much.
  • yunwal 4y ago
    Do you feel the same way about high-level languages instead of writing your own assembly? How about using a bulldozer when a simple shovel could do? Copilot doesn't "do all the thinking for you", it's glorified autocomplete.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• QuadrupleA 4y ago
  Would love to see Fossil get wider adoption: https://www.fossil-scm.org/ https://www.fossil-scm.org/ Single 6mb executable with a version control system, web server, bug database, forums, import/export/sync with git, repo browser, much saner CLI than git, etc. Been using it for 2+ years for all my projects and love it.
  • jen20 4y ago
    Personally I'd like to see BitKeeper get more adoption also. It has many of the same advantages.
  • brabel 4y ago
    They wrote the whole thing in C?! Wow, I really admire people who can turn C into useful, complex projects... I was trying to write C the other day and holy shit, it's incredibly hard to write anything that involves more than a couple of files... it just has almost no abstractions and one small slip and you've got a segfault that terminates your program without trace :D I gave up very quickly and been learning Zig now... as low level, but extremely saner to write stuff. Anyway, why would I usee Fossil rather than Git exactly? Are there code hosts that support it? It does look interesting, but I don't see the motivation to do it when so many hosts support git (people who think GitHub is the "only" host need to look around: there's literally dozens of options), and I'm quite ok using it specially with intelliJ and magit (emacs) support.
    • teruakohatu 4y ago
      > Wow, I really admire people who can turn C into useful, complex project If you use any open source operating systems a significant portion of software you interact with are C (kernel, shell, utilities, sqlite etc).
      • brabel 4y ago
        I'm well aware... but still, when I see new software written in C when there are so many languages available (which was not the case when Linus started writing Linux) it's amazing to me, both because they can actually do it (I definitely don't have the discipline to pull it off, spoiled too much by high level languages) and because they didn't just choose to use something easier like Go or even Java.
• josephcsible 4y ago
  > 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.
  • JoshTriplett 4y ago
    Note that while Copilot is a major motivator for this effort, it isn't the only one; there's a pile of other reasons listed at https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/ https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/ . GitHub and its lock-in has been a problem for a long time, and this is just the most recent problem.
  • lumost 4y ago
    I’d be curious if you could get copilot to cough up its own answer on its legality.
  • mr_toad 4y ago
    > why are your Microsoft Windows and Office codebases not in your training set? This is my favorite question about Copilot ever. While GitHub might have a license to use that code to train the model, it’s debatable what license applies to the output of the model, and what users of the model can do with it. It’s possible for an AI to reproduce something so close to the original that it would be considered an infringement on the original work.
  • ipaddr 4y ago
    My favorite answer is: if you included Microsoft source code the quality of suggestions drops below viable product.
    • codefreeordie 4y ago
      This is a funny and flippant answer, but is also nonsense.
• i_like_apis 4y ago
  I disagree with all of their reasons for disliking GitHub. * They make money from Co-Pilot? Great! * They sell software to ICE? Good. Why wouldn’t they? I’m not interested in anti-immigration-enforcement politics. * They’re a closed-source for-profit company? Great! That’s why their product is high quality.
  • inetknght 4y ago
    > They make money from Co-Pilot? Great! OK let me take your projects and make money from them and not give you anything in return, not even credit. > They sell software to ICE? Good. Why wouldn’t they? I’m not interested in anti-immigration-enforcement politics. ICE policies aside, you should be interested in immigration politics because they're important to people and businesses. Apathy is a bad thing here. > They’re a closed-source for-profit company? Great! That’s why their product is high quality. hahahaha, there are plenty of open-source not-for-profit companies with high quality products and many many many more closed-source for-profit companies with terrible products. See also Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office.
    • iib 4y ago
      > there are plenty of open-source not-for-profit companies with high quality products See git itself.
    • TheRealPomax 4y ago
      You mean two of the most successful pieces of commercial software in the history of modern computing? Because as easy as it is to pretend they're terrible: to millions of users and orgs, they simply aren't.
      • quadrifoliate 4y ago
        Eh, first mover advantage counts for a lot. It doesn't necessarily mean the software is good. Burning coal for generating energy was very "successful" and had great adoption. It's still a terrible method for the environment, and we can feel free to regard it as negative. In this analogy, Microsoft products would be like generating energy by burning garbage, aka a dumpster fire.
• GirishSharma643 4y ago
  The most common and basic thing is almost disappointed for new comer. There are no steps of installation of project, i.e. how to install this project / repo and how to run. A very few maintainer mentioned the steps but a handful runs without error. So yes, Goodbye Github!
• duxup 4y ago
  This isn't very compelling to me. SourceForge went bad ... and everyone left. That doesn't seem like a bad thing and there's no reason for me to think any given site / service will or won't go bad too. I expect that for any number of reasons I might need to move from one site to the next. The rest too is kinda hollow to me. The fact that they're for profit doesn't upset me. I figured they wanted to make a profit when I signed up even ... not sure how that would surprise anyone now. Co-pilot, I personally don't feel there is a compelling reason to leave github due to that either. Maybe I'm not versed enough in some of this but as a rando dev I'm just not having any problems on github these days ... I'm not saying the author is wrong or right or that I'm right or wrong, just that I'm not finding that article very convincing.
  • phodge 4y ago
    There actually _is_ a good argument in there, but the article is really poorly written and all the preamble about SourceForge ends up being a distraction from what you really need to stop and think about: FOSS projects like the Linux kernel use the GPL license because the developers want their code to be free not just for themselves, but for everyone everywhere for all time. It's not acceptable terms for you to take their work and use it to build an alternate operating system that you aren't going to share. If this wasn't important to them they could have just published their code under MIT/BSD licenses. If you were to build an AI that used the Linux source code to generate a "new" closed-source operating system, in a very real sense all you've done is invent a new way to plagiarize the Linux community's work so that you can weasel your way out of their license terms. Even if you got away with this in the courts, it's obviously very unethical. What Copilot does is enable the mass plagiarizing of open source code from everyone all at once, mixed up together so that it's hard to know who the original authors were, and then pretend that somehow this makes it ethical.
  • bink 4y ago
    It's been years, but as I remember it SourceForge's primary downfall was the bundling of malware with binaries. That's why people I know stopped using it completely rather than because it was run on a proprietary platform.
• difflens 4y ago
  > What case law, if any, did you rely on in Microsoft & GitHub's public claim, stated by GitHub's (then) CEO, that: “(1) training ML systems on public data is fair use, (2) the output belongs to the operator, just like with a compiler”? In the interest of transparency and respect to the FOSS community, please also provide the community with your full legal analysis on why you believe that these statements are true. > 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? I'm not sure I buy this argument. In the first point, the authors state that Copilot was trained on public data. In the very next point, they slightly tweak it by saying training was done on "any" code which loses the distinction between public and private code. Obviously Windows and Office are not public code. I also interpreted "public data" to mean they trained on codebases that explicitly specified, say, MIT licenses or other permissible licenses. That seems like fair use to me. Those licenses don't explicitly restrict training AI models on their codebases do they? It's ironic if these licenses started banning AI training now though. That would effectively mean Copilot would be sole trained AI model. I'm happy to be proven wrong though. In general I have a distrust of Copilot. I fear it would make individuals worse programmers in the end at the cost of productivity
  • GTP 4y ago
    Good point, but also with FOSS licenses you can have incompatibilities if you take code distributed under a certain license and you use it into a project distributed under a different license. So I still think there is a double standard here.
  • boryas 4y ago
    CoPilot has been demonstrated to lift code verbatim (including swearing comments): https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309 https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309 So even if it is legal to create a commercial product which outputs GPL code as its main value-add, it still seems like it could put the user in an awkward position of auto-completing big chunks of GPL licensed code into their project.
• netik 4y ago
  Am quite tired of the crying about copilot while everyone is fine with copying code snippets from stackexchange.
• imdsm 4y ago
  > “a broader conversation [about the ethics of AI-assisted software] seemed unlikely to alter your [SFC's] stance, which is why we [GitHub] have not responded to your [SFC's] detailed questions” To be fair, there is a valid point here. If even one party has already made their conclusions and enters into a discussion with no willingness to even entertain ideas, instead just to fight their corner, then why would other parties willingly take part? We've all had those engineering discussions where no matter what is said, there are still engineers who refuse to entertain a concept. They're difficult and draining. I can see why the request would be refused if this was the case.
  • account42 4y ago
    I think it's the other way around - if you only talk to those whose stance you think you can change then you are implicitly admitting that you are unwilling to change your stance. Otherwise there would still be value in hearing the other party out to see if they have anything to say that would make you reconsider your position.
  • JoshTriplett 4y ago
    It seems far more likely that GitHub isn't answering the questions because they don't have answers that support what they're doing. The ask here isn't "don't ever use AI code assistance tools", the ask here is "don't ship something as an AI code assistance product that fails to provide any means of tracking provenance and handling license compliance". Quoting the post: > Meanwhile, the work of our committee continues to carefully study the general question of AI-assisted software development tools. One recent preliminary finding was that AI-assisted software development tools can be constructed in a way that by-default respects FOSS licenses. We will continue to support the committee as they explore that idea further, and, with their help, we are actively monitoring this novel area of research. While Microsoft's GitHub was the first mover in this area, by way of comparison, early reports suggest that Amazon's new CodeWhisperer system (also launched last week) seeks to provide proper attribution and licensing information for code suggestions.
• isodev 4y ago
  What Microsoft is doing with GitHub is gross. Like VSCode, it’s an example of exploiting our natural affinity towards convenience to lock ever-growing parts of the developer community to their services. There are great FOSS tools for hosting source code like https://gitea.io/en-us/ https://gitea.io/en-us/ and https://codeberg.org/ https://codeberg.org/. I’d put the work to self-host and even contribute to any of them.
  • smt88 4y ago
    > Like VSCode, it’s an example of exploiting our natural affinity towards convenience... This makes no sense. Our GitHub lock-in is due to the audience. If a FOSS project leaves, they lose the GitHub audience. It's a social network. VSCode is absolutely nothing like that. You seem to be condemning Microsoft for making a really good product. Is JetBrains also evil for their suite of amazing, convenient products?
    • galleywest200 4y ago
      I had thought that JetBrains products requires a licence, unlike VSCode which is free in regards to monetary cost. However - the main gripe this community has with VSCode is that it is only partially open source. Microsoft adds extra bits to the code that is not open - mainly the items around telemetry. You can get around this with VSCodium or VSCode-OSS, but those are arguably forks and not a MS product.
      • smt88 4y ago
        I still don't understand why that's an issue. VSCode is a proprietary product. There are tons of FOSS alternatives if it doesn't work for someone or the telemetry is a problem. My criticism would only be that the telemetry is not obvious enough for a casual downloader. I don't use VSCode but I'm sure a lot of people do without knowing about it.
        • isodev 4y ago
          The main selling point of VSCode is their extension ecosystem. Most extensions are open source / created by the community. In essence, Microsoft channels FOSS work by third parties in order to create a pipeline for upselling their products and services.
• _gabe_ 4y ago
  This article doesn't compel me to give up github. It seems like it basically talks a lot about how proprietary software is evil and then complains about Copilot. Then it drops this: > GitHub's business model has always been “proprietary vendor lock-in”. How is this Github's business model? Unless you're using Github specific features like Github actions and workflows, it's fairly easy to switch to another Git based host. Then the article provides "alternatives" that are all lacking important features. > If you're ready to take on the challenge now and give up GitHub today, we note that CodeBerg and SourceHut0 are excellent options right now. The article immediately talks about drawbacks with all of these alternatives and then mentions a guide on how to self host using git lab. Why would I go through all the trouble of swapping to a different version control host if I don't gain any value? In addition to not gaining value, I'll also lose features that are very nice to have. This article doesn't convince me at all. Yes Copilot is questionable and we should pursue the ethics behind what it does, but if you want to convince people to give up Github you should at least be prepared to give an alternative that offers a great deal of feature parity.
  • Mathnerd314 4y ago
    > it's fairly easy to switch to another Git based host. > if you want to convince people to give up Github you should at least be prepared to give an alternative that offers a great deal of feature parity. These can't both be true. In fact Github is hard to switch away from, because of all the Github features. This is the lock-in. Github then monetizes this by charging for large files (https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/working-with-files/managing-large-files/about-storage-and-bandwidth-usage https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/working-with-files/m...), private repos, etc. So the SFC argument is that you should switch away from Github now and get the alternatives to feature parity, to avoid Github getting a monopoly.
    • redredrobot 4y ago
      They can both be true. It's can be easy to make the switch and still difficult to convince people to do it if the alternatives are simply crappier.
• seadan83 4y ago
  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 bug reporting be removed - update documentation - find a new website host (and no longer github.io) - find a new CI/CD (we were already burned by travis, github workflows are nice) - teach our user contributors to actually use git! There has been a lot of heartache from them that they have to use the pencil icon on a web ui to edit config files, now we have to take them back to using a git GUI client! We were on github before that blessed pencil icon feature came out, there was no end to the wailing about how unapproachable the process was (super frustrating when users see they have to do something.. frustrating for us because our users wanted to just email is stuff so we could then do the uploading to git work) - lose all PR history - migrate project tracking - find a new place to host release artifacts - update our website to use a new distribution URL (the website scrapes github api to get latest version for download link; it's nice never updating website as we do releases on every merge) - figure out and migrate repository permissions. (We have a hundred repositories of user generated plugin content, everything about migrating that would be a lot of work and missing important features) - lose our search ranking and rebuild our SEO What else to add to this pile.. and all because co-pilot smells?? Meanwhile all of that work is busy work, and not at all feature-pare. That kind of migration would take a long time, seems like that pivot without good reason is the worst kind of churn. Convince me this article is not a temper tantrum about copilot...
  • npteljes 4y ago
    >What else to add to this pile.. and all because co-pilot smells?? You are absolutely right that this all is a huge pain in the ass. GitHub, and later Microsoft, played their cards well. The product both works well, and also creates such a moat of vendor lock-in that it won't make sense to leave.
  • rv77ax 4y ago
    This is called "vendor lock-in" [1]. I believe you have heard it before. If the article's writer read this, please add this as one of the reason why FOSS need to move from GitHub. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_lock-in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_lock-in
• zzo38computer 4y ago
  I had never put anything in GitHub, but I have done and still do read stuff on GitHub. My reasons though are not because of Copilot. It is because I do not use git for my own projects (I self-host Fossil and mirror on Chisel). But if someone else makes mirrors of my code on GitHub (or CodeBerg or SourceHut) then I do not have an objection to that (making more mirrors on different services may be better, anyways; unfortunately if you are using git then a header will be prepended to the file before computing the hash, which makes the integrity more difficult (although it is still possible, since the header is predictable (as far as I know))). Seeing a few examples of output from Copilot (although I have not used it myself and do not intend to do so), they do not seem to be a very good quality. So, I think that it is not worth it, even regardless of licensing issues. If you do move your project to another service, you should please use one which does not require JavaScripts enabled to be able to view the code (even if other functions do not work). Ideally it should also work without CSS. (For these reasons, GitLab is not acceptable.)
• Glyptodon 4y ago
  It seems superficially reasonable that a model trained on your work would be a derivative work of that work? But I am super far from any kind of domain expert.
• alkonaut 4y ago
  The copilot saga hasn’t even played out yet. If it turns out when the legal fog clears that anyone using copilot is always personally responsible for making sure the code was theirs to use (which I see as the likely outcome)- then what difference does copilot make? It basically lets people copy paste FOSS code automatically. We could always do that and they we were always responsible for the consequences. The idea that copilot can somehow “AI-wash” the copyright of large/nontrivial pieces of code seems completely crazy.
  • pas 4y ago
    how does a clean-room implementation of anything works anyway? people personally testify that they haven't seen the thing they want to cleanroom implement, right? and what if they did see it, how would anyone know/catch them? something is too similar is not proof. what if the implementer read a random comment on it on HN that laid out the general architecture of the thing, does make the result a derivative work?
    • alkonaut 4y ago
      I think the fear of copyright infringement from developers being "tainted" by seeing or hearig about some software/implementation is exaggerated. Copyright only applies to expression (code) not ideas. It would be extremely hard for anyone to re-implement anything in a matter exact enough to be plagiarism. For a clean room impl the fear would be patents, not copyright. Any software lacking patents can (my armchair lawyer guess) safely be re-implemented. If people reimplementing have had past access to the source code of the original, that's probably not even a great danger, so long as nothing is copied verbatim. Ideas/designs/architecture/functionality is not protected by copyright.
• longrod 4y ago
  I find it very strange that the same HN crowd that loves open source and wouldn't touch anything proprietary with a 10 foot pole has so many reservations against moving off of GitHub. I am not generalizing here, just surprised. According to what I have seen in my short experience, HN should have ditched GitHub long since. Anyway... I have always been curious as to why the largest hosting for OSS isn't open source itself. Maybe I am not intelligent enough to realize the reasoning behind this. Imagine if git wasn't open source! That's like an OS that only runs open source software but isn't open source itself. It just doesn't make sense for people to trust such an obviously flawed service...and yet they do. And if that wasn't enough when GitHub got acquired by Microsoft very few people thought it amiss. Indeed, even now a lot of people are happy that Microsoft is running their digital homes. I think if GitHub was measured on the FOSS scale it would fall short on every measure. Co-pilot isn't even that big of a deal. That's just the icing on the top. GitHub is untrustworthy top-to-bottom even before there was Co-pilot. But I suppose convenience always trumps openness and freedom. It's especially sad because the whole point behind FOSS was this. Is the whole FOSS idea getting old? The worst thing is that GitHub has monopolized the open source world. We can't even think of moving off of GitHub because of what we'll lose. But how about we do this: We create a dummy repo on GitHub for our project that has all the fancy README, releases, issues, actions etc. but we keep the actual code out of GitHub on an open source service. Would that work? Is that feasible? Basically, we use GitHub's wide adoption for what it's meant to be used: to market/share your project but keep the source code on a separate platform. This would create a new host of problems but I think it can actually work.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • azangru 4y ago
    > and wouldn't touch anything proprietary with a 10 foot pole Consider Macbooks...
  • benwaffle 4y ago
    The problem with a lot of other proprietary platforms is that you don't own your data, so it's not easy to migrate to something else. With git, it's trivial to `git push` to a different platform if you decide to move off of GitHub. And you can at least get your issues out via the API. I think for this reason, as well as network effects, is why many people here are more accepting of GitHub over other proprietary platforms.
• kyrofa 4y ago
  Look, I agree that copilot feels slimy. However, honest question: if you're maintaining an open source project, in most cases I'd say your source is publicly available somewhere. What realistically prevents github from doing exactly what it did with code that isn't even hosted on it? What, with regards to copilot, is changed by moving one's code off of github to some other public site?
  • prohobo 4y ago
    Rate limiting Microsoft's ability to exploit FOSS, and moving to platforms that won't/can't implement abusive practices that cause these kinds of mass exoduses in the first place. I think if Microsoft was figuratively and literally rate limited from accessing such a huge swath of open source code, they might not have been the ones to build something like Copilot and we may have been better off for it. A different, more ethical team might have made something better. Maybe it would even be an open source project.
    • kyrofa 4y ago
      > Rate limiting Microsoft's ability to exploit FOSS [...]. That's my point-- how? Presumably you're just going to host your FOSS somewhere else that Microsoft can still get it.
      • prohobo 4y ago
        The new platform itself could literally rate limit requests to download source code. For example: 100 repos per day. Or, the platform could make it part of their terms of use that licenses must be respected even for machine learning. It could be enough of a barrier to dissuade them. Would something like that stop Microsoft? Maybe, corporations tend to look for low hanging fruit for stuff like this.
        • kyrofa 4y ago
          I'm afraid that feels like wishful thinking more than anything.
• callahad 4y ago
  > twenty-one years ago, the most popular code hosting site, a fully Free and Open Source (FOSS) site called SourceForge, proprietarized all their code — never to make it FOSS again. Didn't SourceForge make its platform F/OSS again 11 years ago, under the name Allura? https://sourceforge.net/blog/new-projects-welcome-to-allura/ https://sourceforge.net/blog/new-projects-welcome-to-allura/ Looks like it ended up at the ASF: https://allura.apache.org/ https://allura.apache.org/
  • loganabbott 4y ago
    That is correct. We informed SF Conservancy about this but they are so far unwilling to correct it.
• thrownaway561 4y ago
  maybe I'm being stupid, but i'm not seeing the issue here. having your code public means that anyone can copy it and use it. forget about respecting licensing and what not. if you don't want anyone copying your code, you have to keep it closed and not publish it to a public repo. i don't think this is necessary a github issue. I can copy code from any other service (gitlab, bitbucket, self hosted repo) as long as the repo is public.
• loganabbott 4y ago
  SourceForge CEO here. The first paragraph of this article is wrong. SourceForge has been built on Apache Allura since 2011. https://allura.apache.org https://allura.apache.org
  • CRConrad 4y ago
    Yeah, because that was the substantive point about your company, its business model, and its relationship to the FOSS community that was made in the article. Not.
    • loganabbott 4y ago
      Publishing wrong information is wrong.
      • CRConrad 4y ago
        So is publishing technically correct but severely misleading information.
• 752963e64 4y ago
  Copilot can train itself over other web's repo... technology is technology.
• nakovet 4y ago
  Nobody mentions User Experience. SourceForge was terrible, Google Code also, Gitlab has an acceptable UX. Github kills it in most fronts. What prevents Github Copilot from expanding to FOSS that is not hosted by them in the future? Just how Google indexes and caches the whole internet, what prevents this thing from going to public gitea of FOSS projects and scraping to train their model!? I love Copilot, will pay for it.
  • doodlesdev 4y ago
    When you join GitHub you accept their ToS which among many things gives them the rights to use your code for stuff like Copilot. Theoretically (although I'm not sure of this is the case, looks like no one does right now) Microsoft would have to change the way they handle code licenses in their training set if they were to use code hosted elsewhere, giving attribution to code from MIT licenses and not using AGPL code at all.
    • nickjj 4y ago
      > When you join GitHub you accept their ToS which among many things gives them the rights to use your code for stuff like Copilot. I get so many "our terms of service changed" emails and they link to a 30+ page document with not even a diff of what changed. I vaguely remember GitHub sending one out maybe in December 2019 but it linked directly to https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-of-service https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t... and didn't even hint what was different so the only way you'd be able to know what changed is by re-reading every single word. This is one of those things where you technically agree by continuing to use their service but no one can realistically be expected to read a 30+ page document for the 20 services they do every time a provider updates their terms without a diff. You'd be reading one of these at least once a week. The email I got from GitHub also didn't include "pilot" anywhere in the body of the email and neither do their current terms of service, so now you need to be able to decipher whatever wording they use to translate back to "co-pilot". After all that I also have lots of emails from noreply@github.com and searching my inbox for emails from that with "terms" in the subject doesn't show anything related to co-pilot. I'm not a lawyer but I can't imagine if you agree to the terms today but 3 months from now new terms have been added -- you don't passively start accepting those terms without an explicit action to say you do after you've been notified of the changes.