10 ms·

The Gullible Software Altruist

64 points by 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 4y ago

PaulHoule 4y ago
So far as I am concerned the story with GitHub copilot is "Nothing more to see here, move on folks." Granted people in business get a sugar rush when they see something that looks like working code generated automatically but at best it is doing the 20% of the work that seems to get you 80% of the way there except taking the bugs out of something written mindlessly is a stupendously expensive process.
- SahAssar 4y ago
  You're not concerned about the license violations?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    Through the recent discussions I took part, I understood that many people think Free and Open software licenses as a black and white matter. Is the code there? If yes, I can copy it. If not, it's verboten. The license attached to the code is not important in their eyes. As one of my friend told me, his (native English speaking) professor at the university told him: "My English is not good enough to understand what is written there". OTOH, I left GitHub the day Copilot is released for production. This is a social problem, and we need to increase awareness IMHO. There's no other choice.
    - SahAssar 4y ago
      But surely a corporation like github should understand licenses well enough to realize that if copilot spits out a 1:1 copy of a piece of code it needs to at least tell the user the license for that code?
      - bayindirh 4y ago
        They shift the responsibility to the Copilot user. From the official documentation: You are responsible for ensuring the security and quality of your code. We recommend you take the same precautions when using code generated by GitHub Copilot that you would when using any code you didn't write yourself. These precautions include rigorous testing, IP scanning, and tracking for security vulnerabilities [0]. Also, you don't have to return a 1:1 copy of the code to breach the license. Adapting it to the context at hand is an effectively deriving the code, and you have a derived version of a licensed piece of code. Worse is, you can't check the code's license, because you can't underive and see where does it come from. With this move, GitHub as a company is completely dissolved in my eyes. It's purely and squarely Microsoft now, because they behave like Microsoft, not GitHub. [0]: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/overview-of-github-copilot/about-github-copilot#using-github-copilot https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/overview-of-github-copilo...
mistrial9 4y ago
fun and worthy post @! as someone who is "old enough to remember the events of the 90s" this captures so much in the intro paragraphs, with humor and without lecturing. Sure it misses important nuance here and there.. but overall, well done! thanks, recommended
Stampo00 4y ago
I'm so tired of this argument. I want to host stuff myself. Really, I do. But I really don't have enough time in the day to do it. I set up a blog this weekend using Hugo, Ansible, and Github Actions to host it on NearlyFreeSpeech.NET. It "only" took two days, but I'm exhausted and I don't actually have any content yet. I host Plex and TiddlyWiki at home on my Raspberry Pi. I used docker and traefik. Sometimes it still has weird issues and I have to reboot it. It was another project that "only" took a weekend and left me exhausted. So let's say I don't want to self host, but I don't want to use Github. What are my options? I used to use Bitbucket, but I moved to Github a few years ago to consolidate my accounts. I liked Bitbucket, but people give you weird looks when you give them a Bitbucket URL. It's not as seamlessly supported in apps that can automatically understand Github urls. Confluence kept buying other products and tacking them on. And they kept trying to upsell me. Then there's Gitlab. I'm going to have to get used to it because my employer is transitioning to it, away from Github. This article mentions developers having short memories. I remember when Gitlab decidedly said they'll do business with anyone back when people were shaming tech companies for helping and cooperating with ICE a few years ago. That left a bad taste in my mouth. There's Sourcehut. But I have friends with beef with the guy who made it and I don't want to support him. I can't help but feel like Github is probably the lesser evil here. Honestly, I'd pay for a service if I believed in it. It's important to me that I'm the customer, not the product. That's why I switched from Gmail to ProtonMail a few years ago. I have their top tier paid account because I believe in them and I want to get what I pay for. Sorry, I don't really have a point. I'm just tired of this argument. I'd self host in a second if I could do it quickly, easily, and reliably. But I don't think I can.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  you have to band with others to make it .. all the tools are there
  - Stampo00 4y ago
    I'm sure the tools are out there. But I'm at a point where I have more money than time for this. I empathize with the self-hosting ethos. I want a more decentralized internet. But I don't enjoy the setup and maintenance. I have previous little free time. I even spend much of it writing software, because I enjoy that. I don't enjoy being a sysadmim or my own personal devops. I think I realized that in college when a friend tried to get me to run Gentoo as my first linux distro. I never made it to a desktop! I still run linux as my daily driver today, but I'm currently using Pop!_OS after having used Ubuntu since college. Because when I'm using my daily driver computer, I want to use it, not maintain it.
Analemma_ 4y ago
I'm gonna be honest: I don't get the outrage over Copilot. To me, it's obviously totally unobjectionable. If journalists were getting outraged that their newspaper columns were being consumed as GPT training data, we'd correctly call that silly: it's public text now, so long as you're not reproducing it verbatim and thus violating copyright, users can consume it for whatever purpose they see fit.
- rightbyte 4y ago
  Copilot is reproducing verbatim though.
- camgunz 4y ago
  It blatantly violates many copyleft and attribution clauses in licenses. I think the objection is that it's illegal. At least, that's mine.
- fny 4y ago
  It's because software developers smell the disruption. We've automated lord knows how many people out of their jobs. We're apparently not immune either. Frankly, no/low-code is more of a threat IMO, but copilot is eerie.
dibujante 4y ago
My brother, the 90's were thirty years ago.
gernb 4y ago
Am I mis-reading it? the article claims Microsoft had an internal policy of "embrace, extend, extinguish". As proof it links to Wikipedia. Wikipedia does not corroborate this. Instead it says some journalist made up that phrase. Microsoft themselves had "embrace, extend, innovate" which is a fully reasonable position
- gernb 4y ago
  Let me add, my understanding of the 2 major things people complained about at the time are (1) extending Java with access to OLE/COM/DCOM (2) extending IE with ActiveX (which is OLE/COM/DCOM access in the browser). It's always seemed like to me like both of those as the natural thing to do as an engineer. Microsoft and Windows users had 1000s and 1000s of OLE/COM/DCOM libraries. A new system/language appears and gets popular. You want to use all you existing software and solutions with this new system/language. So you find a way to make them interop. It requires zero malice to decide to do this. Irregardless of if it benefits your company it is arguably the most common sense and natural thing nearly any engineer would do.
  - wrs 4y ago
    There’s no contradiction here. Both things are true. The engineers at MS thought Java was a great idea, and built a world-class implementation team for it. Of course they added P/Invoke (easy DLL native code integration) and COM interop because that’s naturally what you need in the Windows environment. There was plenty of enthusiasm for Java in the MS engineering community. From MS’s business perspective, that was also great for the 3-E strategy, and more Windows-specific features were encouraged. From Sun’s business perspective, that went totally against the cross-platform Java strategy and was grounds for war. The business folks had a major falling-out, and the same MS engineering team, now legally prevented from working on Java, built a better Java (CLR) for Windows software with the lessons learned. The real disconnect on the engineering side was that the MS engineers thought of Java as just another language they could implement and improve on (like C), whereas Sun engineers thought of Java as a world-changing initiative where the WORA abstraction layer was paramount. Source: I was there.
- TAForObvReasons 4y ago
unixbane 4y ago
The first few paragraphs sum up a lot of stuff I was thinking for the last years or decade. Microsoft and Google are still scummy corporations and operate on bad faith and abuse their legal power to prosecute people for no reason other than loss aversion, as per the American status quo.
nixpulvis 4y ago
I'd like to make a point about what Open Source is to me. At it's core, open source is not about The Internet at all. Open Source is about being able to look at the source of the software you have. If someone gives me (or god forbid I buy) some software, can I inspect the source? If yes, then it's Open Source. Putting code on the internet is another thing entirely. Related, sure; but ultimately not at all the same. In fact, there's so much "open source" crap out there that doesn't even compile, build, or run, that isn't Open Source at all! OK, maybe it still is, software is allowed to have bugs... but I digress.
- TAForObvReasons 4y ago
  What you are describing is "Source available", which is a fairly common practice. Many large "open source" projects with a paid tier will have proprietary code in the repo for all to inspect, but it doesn't make those features open source. Microsoft has a special program for governments and institutions to inspect certain product code.
  - nixpulvis 4y ago
    Do source available projects make it so I can actually edit and run the changes? I guess that might be what I'm getting at here...
syrrim 4y ago
>These programmers have seemingly imagined a fantasy land in which Microsoft is now totally-on-board with the Richard Stallman free software fairyland socialist utopia. Nobody imagines that. But nobody besides a very small group is on board with stallman anyways. That microsoft recognizes the value of open source to their bottom line is sufficient.
globalreset 4y ago
How is self-hosting protecting from Copilot infringing on your license? One can imagine Copilot fetching your self-hosted repo and adding it to its database, or someone forking your self-hosted repo, hosting it on github which will still be used by Copilot. The issue of respecting the license of Open Source code by these "AIs" it orthogonal to where the source is being hosted. I have no problem with Copilot and other "AIs" using my source code, as long as they respect the license. If copilot spits out (even partially) my GPL code it is still GPL. Other than that - it's free and open for corporate and personal use.
- cheriot 4y ago
  When training the natural language model, I don't think it's possible to trace back from an output to which training data it comes from. So it will never spit out something and say it's GPL licensed. Similarly, trying to prove a GPL violation because the model's output is based on any particular input seems impossible.
  - globalreset 4y ago
    How very convenient. So many billions of things that "AI" can remember and infer, and yet it can't remember that one important 3-letter metadata. Reminds of these politicians that when questions in the court answer "I can't remember" for everything.
blt 4y ago
All these instructions for self hosting various services are looking like guides for rsync-based backup before Dropbox. We need some easy way to set up self hosting of all the popular decentralized systems at once with good security, proper backups, etc ready to go out of the box. Of course it needs to make migration away to true self hosting easy. Or even something like a Raspberry Pi in a case with all this stuff.
fmajid 4y ago
Another reason to boycott Microsoft’s Pluton PCs that refuse to boot OSes other than Windows. https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/11/lenovo_secured_core/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/11/lenovo_secured_core/
Hackbraten 4y ago
> A programmer working on a project for a large corporation—as I was told—shouldn’t even be reading code that is licensed under, for instance, GPL. In effect, absorbing information from that code and “repurposing” it in a new solution would constitute an intellectual property rights violation if not expressly permitted by the license. Wait a minute. Reading some GPL’ed code and then writing a new thing, based on the ideas you’ve learned from the code, can be an intellectual property rights violation?
- NoGravitas 4y ago
  Yes. Clean room implementations are a thing for a reason.
  - thegeomaster 4y ago
    They are a thing for CYA reasons. Abstract ideas and algorithms are not intellectual property, only the concrete code implementing them is, and as such do not fall under licenses such as GPL.
  - phendrenad2 4y ago
    Not only that, a clean room isn't enough. You need to hire programmers straight out of college who have never looked at GPL code. Just kidding, it's even worse than that - most developers right out of college have read at least one character of GPL licensed-code. Even stack overflow is tainted, because the questions and answers there were written by people who read GPL code. It's best to exclusively hire race car drivers and fedex delivery workers to your software development workforce, as they are statistically least likely to have been exposed to GPL code (per bureau of labor and statistics).
- smsm42 4y ago
  That would likely depend on the meaning of "based on" (not a lawyer here!), and the actual lawyers would feel very happy charging exorbitant sums for arguing it out in court. As any sensible corporation (that is not deriving its income from lawyer's fees) would like to avoid that so the easiest approach would be "don't look at GPL code". That raises an interesting question though. If I read the code, remember it, and then re-type it as is, that'd obviously fall under license's terms. But if I write an ML process, that knows to read code, understand it, and reproduce it, and it ends up reproducing the said code byte-for-byte, is that considered copying too? Suppose I didn't intend for ML process to work that way, I just programmed it in a way to find optimal solutions, and trained it on a dataset of GPL code, and it happened that this particular piece of GPL code, byte-for-byte, was chosen by the ML algorithm as optimal. Did I copy the code? Did I violate the license even earlier, when training the ML model on GPL code?
fny 4y ago
First they came for the cashiers, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a cashier. Then they came for the taxi drivers, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a taxi driver. Then they came for the hotels, and I did not speak out— Because I owned a second property I could rent. Then they came for me—and—and—holy shit this is totally unacceptable! You can't automate MY livelihood away!!
- collaborative 4y ago
  Copyright is what this discussion is about
zbyte64 4y ago
> When property ownership disappears, all natural rights do. Statements like this undermines their argument. Microsoft secures all sorts of rights under their EULA and is contractual. Enforcing property ownership is exactly how Microsoft has risen to dominance. And that is to say nothing of the a-historicism of this explanation of property rights.
- colinsane 4y ago
  is it common to group IP rights into "natural rights"? any argument i've heard for property rights emerging from "natural rights" has been reasoned from the resource in question being scarce (and hence, my taking of your property immediately deprives you of that resource). i've never heard the argument "my copying of your property deprives you of the benefits from some future interaction i would have otherwise voluntarily entered into" argued from a natural rights perspective.
  - _0ffh 4y ago
    You are correct, the word combination "intellectual property" does not make sense from a natural rights perspective.
  - collaborative 4y ago
    For creators - i.e. self employed - the creation is the scarce resource that allows them to make a living Copying/stealing their creation is akin to making a worker work for free Would making workers work for free be less moral the minute there is a worker surplus? Theft is theft, it doesn't matter whether the stolen product is a scarce resource
    - aloisdg 4y ago
      But what if the creation was made on top of others ones?
  - ATsch 4y ago
    I'm not sure about IP rights, but saying natural rights derive from property rights, which this sounds like, is pretty popular in right wing libertarian circles. The idea being that if you own yourself, all human rights become property rights. This is the basis of things like Ayn Rand's "objectivism", a philisophy effectively claiming to have solved morality once and for all. It is, of course, clearly nonsense if you try to use it for anything more than justify unfettered capitalism or drug legalization. Most famously being unable to effectively condemn things like pedophilia, slave contracts or human trafficking. But this exact ability to come to counterintuitive conclusions about many things means it remains very popular among certain groups of people.
colinsane 4y ago
you're not self-hosting. you're using a managed hosting product. Digital Ocean (an entity which is not your self) is hosting things for you. On top of that this blog is hosted by Substack (also not your self). nothing intrinsically wrong with either of those, but if you simultaneously espouse the greatness of "self-hosting" and the awfulness of "cake-eating corporations" then this comes off as egregiously phony.
- dasil003 4y ago
  This seems like an odd bit of pedantry. Digital Ocean is just providing generic VPS services, they aren't operating at the git layer at all. The author fully controls the URLs in question, and can move to any number of equivalent server providers. What value does your litmus test add?
  - colinsane 4y ago
    1. it's expanding the scope of "self-host". i'm sympathetic to anti-prescriptivists, but when self-hosting is something i care about and strive for i don't want for its definition to weaken without myself having a fallback phrase to use in place of the original "self-host". 2. his argument for moving away from MS GitHub is based on the understanding that license enforcement is lax in the modern era. the reasons he can expect to have greater license enforcement on a VPS than on MS GitHub may be real, but aren't immediately obvious to me. the most bulletproof defense seems to be one of obscurity: it takes a VPS provider more effort to decode his git repos than it does a managed git provider. any other defense i can come up with for why a VPS would enforce data agreements ought to apply similarly to GitHub (which is evidently not true). i admit that a VPS achieves certain things better than self-hosting (as you say, it's easy to migrate, or deploy to multiple machines and have failover/load-balancing, etc). if the author is making a tradeoff between that and his license ideals, then his current solution might very well be right for him. on the other hand, if he prioritizes his license ideals as much as his post makes it seem, then he's already done half the work to go full self-hosting and may as well take the next step (as he says, "one day is worth it for a project that's going to have 10,000 hours of investment").
throwaway675309 4y ago
As just a simple thought exercise, imagine if you wrote a fictional book that takes place on the moon, and you took a whopping entire paragraph out of one of JK Rowlings harry potter books, now imagine that you changed a few of the adjectives or pronouns and pasted it in. I mean yeah legally there might be some level of copyright infringement here but that little fragment constitutes less than one percent of Rawlings work, and your entire book doesn't even follow the same plot as the Harry Potter book. Nobody gives a crap. I also feel like there's a bit of a double standard, how many people knowingly lift things wholesale from Stack overflow without requiring and including the required attribution? How many times have you found a snippet of code online and implemented it in your code base without determining whether you need to provide attribution? People are getting all worked up over basically nothing, in more than 90% of use cases for copilot you just wanted to fill out a basic boiler plate level function, and it does so beautifully.
elforce002 4y ago
MSFT is something else. Almost all developers were against Microsoft in the 2000s. Then they "embraced" OSS and Linux since they knew that going against developers would not get them far in the long run. "Honeymoon" phase They were catering to devs with free tools like vscode, WSL, etc..., A generous tier for GitHub (GitHub was bleeding devs right after they announced ms just bought them), etc..., Basically, pampering us. "True colors" phase The honeymoon is over and now they're showing their true colors. Copilot (devs do the heavy lifting stuff and they get all the goodies), vscode with different flavors (c# related issues), sunsetted atom in favor of vscode (one less competitor), etc.. There so much the dev community can tolerate before going nuclear on them.

64 points by 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 4y ago

So far as I am concerned the story with GitHub copilot is "Nothing more to see here, move on folks." Granted people in business get a sugar rush when they see something that looks like working code generated automatically but at best it is doing the 20% of the work that seems to get you 80% of the way there except taking the bugs out of something written mindlessly is a stupendously expensive process.

SahAssar 4y ago
You're not concerned about the license violations?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bayindirh 4y ago
  Through the recent discussions I took part, I understood that many people think Free and Open software licenses as a black and white matter. Is the code there? If yes, I can copy it. If not, it's verboten. The license attached to the code is not important in their eyes. As one of my friend told me, his (native English speaking) professor at the university told him: "My English is not good enough to understand what is written there". OTOH, I left GitHub the day Copilot is released for production. This is a social problem, and we need to increase awareness IMHO. There's no other choice.
  - SahAssar 4y ago
    But surely a corporation like github should understand licenses well enough to realize that if copilot spits out a 1:1 copy of a piece of code it needs to at least tell the user the license for that code?
    - bayindirh 4y ago
      They shift the responsibility to the Copilot user. From the official documentation: You are responsible for ensuring the security and quality of your code. We recommend you take the same precautions when using code generated by GitHub Copilot that you would when using any code you didn't write yourself. These precautions include rigorous testing, IP scanning, and tracking for security vulnerabilities [0]. Also, you don't have to return a 1:1 copy of the code to breach the license. Adapting it to the context at hand is an effectively deriving the code, and you have a derived version of a licensed piece of code. Worse is, you can't check the code's license, because you can't underive and see where does it come from. With this move, GitHub as a company is completely dissolved in my eyes. It's purely and squarely Microsoft now, because they behave like Microsoft, not GitHub. [0]: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/overview-of-github-copilot/about-github-copilot#using-github-copilot https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/overview-of-github-copilo...

mistrial9 4y ago

fun and worthy post @! as someone who is "old enough to remember the events of the 90s" this captures so much in the intro paragraphs, with humor and without lecturing. Sure it misses important nuance here and there.. but overall, well done! thanks, recommended

Stampo00 4y ago

I'm so tired of this argument. I want to host stuff myself. Really, I do. But I really don't have enough time in the day to do it. I set up a blog this weekend using Hugo, Ansible, and Github Actions to host it on NearlyFreeSpeech.NET. It "only" took two days, but I'm exhausted and I don't actually have any content yet. I host Plex and TiddlyWiki at home on my Raspberry Pi. I used docker and traefik. Sometimes it still has weird issues and I have to reboot it. It was another project that "only" took a weekend and left me exhausted. So let's say I don't want to self host, but I don't want to use Github. What are my options? I used to use Bitbucket, but I moved to Github a few years ago to consolidate my accounts. I liked Bitbucket, but people give you weird looks when you give them a Bitbucket URL. It's not as seamlessly supported in apps that can automatically understand Github urls. Confluence kept buying other products and tacking them on. And they kept trying to upsell me. Then there's Gitlab. I'm going to have to get used to it because my employer is transitioning to it, away from Github. This article mentions developers having short memories. I remember when Gitlab decidedly said they'll do business with anyone back when people were shaming tech companies for helping and cooperating with ICE a few years ago. That left a bad taste in my mouth. There's Sourcehut. But I have friends with beef with the guy who made it and I don't want to support him. I can't help but feel like Github is probably the lesser evil here. Honestly, I'd pay for a service if I believed in it. It's important to me that I'm the customer, not the product. That's why I switched from Gmail to ProtonMail a few years ago. I have their top tier paid account because I believe in them and I want to get what I pay for. Sorry, I don't really have a point. I'm just tired of this argument. I'd self host in a second if I could do it quickly, easily, and reliably. But I don't think I can.

mistrial9 4y ago
you have to band with others to make it .. all the tools are there
- Stampo00 4y ago
  I'm sure the tools are out there. But I'm at a point where I have more money than time for this. I empathize with the self-hosting ethos. I want a more decentralized internet. But I don't enjoy the setup and maintenance. I have previous little free time. I even spend much of it writing software, because I enjoy that. I don't enjoy being a sysadmim or my own personal devops. I think I realized that in college when a friend tried to get me to run Gentoo as my first linux distro. I never made it to a desktop! I still run linux as my daily driver today, but I'm currently using Pop!_OS after having used Ubuntu since college. Because when I'm using my daily driver computer, I want to use it, not maintain it.

Analemma_ 4y ago

I'm gonna be honest: I don't get the outrage over Copilot. To me, it's obviously totally unobjectionable. If journalists were getting outraged that their newspaper columns were being consumed as GPT training data, we'd correctly call that silly: it's public text now, so long as you're not reproducing it verbatim and thus violating copyright, users can consume it for whatever purpose they see fit.

rightbyte 4y ago
Copilot is reproducing verbatim though.
camgunz 4y ago
It blatantly violates many copyleft and attribution clauses in licenses. I think the objection is that it's illegal. At least, that's mine.
fny 4y ago
It's because software developers smell the disruption. We've automated lord knows how many people out of their jobs. We're apparently not immune either. Frankly, no/low-code is more of a threat IMO, but copilot is eerie.

dibujante 4y ago

My brother, the 90's were thirty years ago.

gernb 4y ago

Am I mis-reading it? the article claims Microsoft had an internal policy of "embrace, extend, extinguish". As proof it links to Wikipedia. Wikipedia does not corroborate this. Instead it says some journalist made up that phrase. Microsoft themselves had "embrace, extend, innovate" which is a fully reasonable position

gernb 4y ago
Let me add, my understanding of the 2 major things people complained about at the time are (1) extending Java with access to OLE/COM/DCOM (2) extending IE with ActiveX (which is OLE/COM/DCOM access in the browser). It's always seemed like to me like both of those as the natural thing to do as an engineer. Microsoft and Windows users had 1000s and 1000s of OLE/COM/DCOM libraries. A new system/language appears and gets popular. You want to use all you existing software and solutions with this new system/language. So you find a way to make them interop. It requires zero malice to decide to do this. Irregardless of if it benefits your company it is arguably the most common sense and natural thing nearly any engineer would do.
- wrs 4y ago
  There’s no contradiction here. Both things are true. The engineers at MS thought Java was a great idea, and built a world-class implementation team for it. Of course they added P/Invoke (easy DLL native code integration) and COM interop because that’s naturally what you need in the Windows environment. There was plenty of enthusiasm for Java in the MS engineering community. From MS’s business perspective, that was also great for the 3-E strategy, and more Windows-specific features were encouraged. From Sun’s business perspective, that went totally against the cross-platform Java strategy and was grounds for war. The business folks had a major falling-out, and the same MS engineering team, now legally prevented from working on Java, built a better Java (CLR) for Windows software with the lessons learned. The real disconnect on the engineering side was that the MS engineers thought of Java as just another language they could implement and improve on (like C), whereas Sun engineers thought of Java as a world-changing initiative where the WORA abstraction layer was paramount. Source: I was there.
TAForObvReasons 4y ago

unixbane 4y ago

The first few paragraphs sum up a lot of stuff I was thinking for the last years or decade. Microsoft and Google are still scummy corporations and operate on bad faith and abuse their legal power to prosecute people for no reason other than loss aversion, as per the American status quo.

nixpulvis 4y ago

I'd like to make a point about what Open Source is to me. At it's core, open source is not about The Internet at all. Open Source is about being able to look at the source of the software you have. If someone gives me (or god forbid I buy) some software, can I inspect the source? If yes, then it's Open Source. Putting code on the internet is another thing entirely. Related, sure; but ultimately not at all the same. In fact, there's so much "open source" crap out there that doesn't even compile, build, or run, that isn't Open Source at all! OK, maybe it still is, software is allowed to have bugs... but I digress.

TAForObvReasons 4y ago
What you are describing is "Source available", which is a fairly common practice. Many large "open source" projects with a paid tier will have proprietary code in the repo for all to inspect, but it doesn't make those features open source. Microsoft has a special program for governments and institutions to inspect certain product code.
- nixpulvis 4y ago
  Do source available projects make it so I can actually edit and run the changes? I guess that might be what I'm getting at here...

syrrim 4y ago

>These programmers have seemingly imagined a fantasy land in which Microsoft is now totally-on-board with the Richard Stallman free software fairyland socialist utopia. Nobody imagines that. But nobody besides a very small group is on board with stallman anyways. That microsoft recognizes the value of open source to their bottom line is sufficient.

globalreset 4y ago

How is self-hosting protecting from Copilot infringing on your license? One can imagine Copilot fetching your self-hosted repo and adding it to its database, or someone forking your self-hosted repo, hosting it on github which will still be used by Copilot. The issue of respecting the license of Open Source code by these "AIs" it orthogonal to where the source is being hosted. I have no problem with Copilot and other "AIs" using my source code, as long as they respect the license. If copilot spits out (even partially) my GPL code it is still GPL. Other than that - it's free and open for corporate and personal use.

cheriot 4y ago
When training the natural language model, I don't think it's possible to trace back from an output to which training data it comes from. So it will never spit out something and say it's GPL licensed. Similarly, trying to prove a GPL violation because the model's output is based on any particular input seems impossible.
- globalreset 4y ago
  How very convenient. So many billions of things that "AI" can remember and infer, and yet it can't remember that one important 3-letter metadata. Reminds of these politicians that when questions in the court answer "I can't remember" for everything.

blt 4y ago

All these instructions for self hosting various services are looking like guides for rsync-based backup before Dropbox. We need some easy way to set up self hosting of all the popular decentralized systems at once with good security, proper backups, etc ready to go out of the box. Of course it needs to make migration away to true self hosting easy. Or even something like a Raspberry Pi in a case with all this stuff.

fmajid 4y ago

Another reason to boycott Microsoft’s Pluton PCs that refuse to boot OSes other than Windows. https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/11/lenovo_secured_core/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/11/lenovo_secured_core/

Hackbraten 4y ago

> A programmer working on a project for a large corporation—as I was told—shouldn’t even be reading code that is licensed under, for instance, GPL. In effect, absorbing information from that code and “repurposing” it in a new solution would constitute an intellectual property rights violation if not expressly permitted by the license. Wait a minute. Reading some GPL’ed code and then writing a new thing, based on the ideas you’ve learned from the code, can be an intellectual property rights violation?

NoGravitas 4y ago
Yes. Clean room implementations are a thing for a reason.
- thegeomaster 4y ago
  They are a thing for CYA reasons. Abstract ideas and algorithms are not intellectual property, only the concrete code implementing them is, and as such do not fall under licenses such as GPL.
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  Not only that, a clean room isn't enough. You need to hire programmers straight out of college who have never looked at GPL code. Just kidding, it's even worse than that - most developers right out of college have read at least one character of GPL licensed-code. Even stack overflow is tainted, because the questions and answers there were written by people who read GPL code. It's best to exclusively hire race car drivers and fedex delivery workers to your software development workforce, as they are statistically least likely to have been exposed to GPL code (per bureau of labor and statistics).
smsm42 4y ago
That would likely depend on the meaning of "based on" (not a lawyer here!), and the actual lawyers would feel very happy charging exorbitant sums for arguing it out in court. As any sensible corporation (that is not deriving its income from lawyer's fees) would like to avoid that so the easiest approach would be "don't look at GPL code". That raises an interesting question though. If I read the code, remember it, and then re-type it as is, that'd obviously fall under license's terms. But if I write an ML process, that knows to read code, understand it, and reproduce it, and it ends up reproducing the said code byte-for-byte, is that considered copying too? Suppose I didn't intend for ML process to work that way, I just programmed it in a way to find optimal solutions, and trained it on a dataset of GPL code, and it happened that this particular piece of GPL code, byte-for-byte, was chosen by the ML algorithm as optimal. Did I copy the code? Did I violate the license even earlier, when training the ML model on GPL code?

fny 4y ago

First they came for the cashiers, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a cashier. Then they came for the taxi drivers, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a taxi driver. Then they came for the hotels, and I did not speak out— Because I owned a second property I could rent. Then they came for me—and—and—holy shit this is totally unacceptable! You can't automate MY livelihood away!!

collaborative 4y ago
Copyright is what this discussion is about

zbyte64 4y ago

> When property ownership disappears, all natural rights do. Statements like this undermines their argument. Microsoft secures all sorts of rights under their EULA and is contractual. Enforcing property ownership is exactly how Microsoft has risen to dominance. And that is to say nothing of the a-historicism of this explanation of property rights.

colinsane 4y ago
is it common to group IP rights into "natural rights"? any argument i've heard for property rights emerging from "natural rights" has been reasoned from the resource in question being scarce (and hence, my taking of your property immediately deprives you of that resource). i've never heard the argument "my copying of your property deprives you of the benefits from some future interaction i would have otherwise voluntarily entered into" argued from a natural rights perspective.
- _0ffh 4y ago
  You are correct, the word combination "intellectual property" does not make sense from a natural rights perspective.
- collaborative 4y ago
  For creators - i.e. self employed - the creation is the scarce resource that allows them to make a living Copying/stealing their creation is akin to making a worker work for free Would making workers work for free be less moral the minute there is a worker surplus? Theft is theft, it doesn't matter whether the stolen product is a scarce resource
  - aloisdg 4y ago
    But what if the creation was made on top of others ones?
- ATsch 4y ago
  I'm not sure about IP rights, but saying natural rights derive from property rights, which this sounds like, is pretty popular in right wing libertarian circles. The idea being that if you own yourself, all human rights become property rights. This is the basis of things like Ayn Rand's "objectivism", a philisophy effectively claiming to have solved morality once and for all. It is, of course, clearly nonsense if you try to use it for anything more than justify unfettered capitalism or drug legalization. Most famously being unable to effectively condemn things like pedophilia, slave contracts or human trafficking. But this exact ability to come to counterintuitive conclusions about many things means it remains very popular among certain groups of people.

colinsane 4y ago

you're not self-hosting. you're using a managed hosting product. Digital Ocean (an entity which is not your self) is hosting things for you. On top of that this blog is hosted by Substack (also not your self). nothing intrinsically wrong with either of those, but if you simultaneously espouse the greatness of "self-hosting" and the awfulness of "cake-eating corporations" then this comes off as egregiously phony.

dasil003 4y ago
This seems like an odd bit of pedantry. Digital Ocean is just providing generic VPS services, they aren't operating at the git layer at all. The author fully controls the URLs in question, and can move to any number of equivalent server providers. What value does your litmus test add?
- colinsane 4y ago
  1. it's expanding the scope of "self-host". i'm sympathetic to anti-prescriptivists, but when self-hosting is something i care about and strive for i don't want for its definition to weaken without myself having a fallback phrase to use in place of the original "self-host". 2. his argument for moving away from MS GitHub is based on the understanding that license enforcement is lax in the modern era. the reasons he can expect to have greater license enforcement on a VPS than on MS GitHub may be real, but aren't immediately obvious to me. the most bulletproof defense seems to be one of obscurity: it takes a VPS provider more effort to decode his git repos than it does a managed git provider. any other defense i can come up with for why a VPS would enforce data agreements ought to apply similarly to GitHub (which is evidently not true). i admit that a VPS achieves certain things better than self-hosting (as you say, it's easy to migrate, or deploy to multiple machines and have failover/load-balancing, etc). if the author is making a tradeoff between that and his license ideals, then his current solution might very well be right for him. on the other hand, if he prioritizes his license ideals as much as his post makes it seem, then he's already done half the work to go full self-hosting and may as well take the next step (as he says, "one day is worth it for a project that's going to have 10,000 hours of investment").

throwaway675309 4y ago

As just a simple thought exercise, imagine if you wrote a fictional book that takes place on the moon, and you took a whopping entire paragraph out of one of JK Rowlings harry potter books, now imagine that you changed a few of the adjectives or pronouns and pasted it in. I mean yeah legally there might be some level of copyright infringement here but that little fragment constitutes less than one percent of Rawlings work, and your entire book doesn't even follow the same plot as the Harry Potter book. Nobody gives a crap. I also feel like there's a bit of a double standard, how many people knowingly lift things wholesale from Stack overflow without requiring and including the required attribution? How many times have you found a snippet of code online and implemented it in your code base without determining whether you need to provide attribution? People are getting all worked up over basically nothing, in more than 90% of use cases for copilot you just wanted to fill out a basic boiler plate level function, and it does so beautifully.

elforce002 4y ago

MSFT is something else. Almost all developers were against Microsoft in the 2000s. Then they "embraced" OSS and Linux since they knew that going against developers would not get them far in the long run. "Honeymoon" phase They were catering to devs with free tools like vscode, WSL, etc..., A generous tier for GitHub (GitHub was bleeding devs right after they announced ms just bought them), etc..., Basically, pampering us. "True colors" phase The honeymoon is over and now they're showing their true colors. Copilot (devs do the heavy lifting stuff and they get all the goodies), vscode with different flavors (c# related issues), sunsetted atom in favor of vscode (one less competitor), etc.. There so much the dev community can tolerate before going nuclear on them.