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Saying Goodbye to GitHub

• tpoacher 4y ago
  I've replaced most of my repositories on github with notices like this one (for the same reason): https://github.com/tpapastylianou/process_optargs https://github.com/tpapastylianou/process_optargs I wonder if there's a licence out there already that enables use for humans, but restricts use by robots. (GPLv4 perhaps?)
• addmin123 4y ago
  You have your points, i have to admit. Made me think about it too.
• lloydatkinson 4y ago
  A bit pompous without real content.
• alex_suzuki 4y ago
  While I agree with the general observation of the article, the tone and wording feels needlessly harsh and subjective. Sentences like „I could go to GitLab, but they have their own fair share of issues and a disgusting UI/UX.“ really diminish the article and by association, also the author.
  • cookiengineer 4y ago
    I don't understand why GitLab (as in gitlab.com) doesn't focus more on the discovery part in order to make people feel more welcome. I was using github.com/explore almost daily while it lasted. The trending repositories by language were an amazing tool to discover new tools and ideas. I really wish GitLab had something equivalent to this!
    • andrewstuart2 4y ago
      I would probably agree that GitHub is better for discovery than GitLab, but the OP's comment is funny to me, because having worked extensively with both, I'm a much bigger fan of GitLab's UI and UX for builders. Groups and nesting are massive when it comes to being able to work with teams, and the fact that you can set options across groups at any level eliminates whole classes of things that are frustrating problems on github, or anything else that uses flat hierarchies.
    • jacooper 4y ago
      I think gitlab just gave up on trying to compete with github. They don't care about anything other than enterprise use cases, which are mostly on private instances.
    • toastal 4y ago
      I wrote a (public) uBlock filter list to hide this social media-like stuff. The “you might also like” genre exists to keep you on the platform and I have enough distractions.
    • esskay 4y ago
      Gitlab is a bit weird in that regard. Their standalone self-hosted use of it is great, but overall discovery is extremely poor on both self hosted and cloud editions. They seem to have based the whole thing on the way Bitbucket works and completely ignored that being able to find a repo you've not been directly added to would be slightly useful. If someone from gitlab is reading this and thinking "But you can find things" - you're blinded by the issue being an internal user. There might be ways of doing it, but its a convoluted mess and doesn't come close to github in that regard.
    • john_cogs 4y ago
      GitLab team member here. In our 15.10 release (March 22), we added a new section called Explore that helps with content discovery and includes a tab for Trending projects that can be filtered by language. You can read out it in the release notes [0] or just go check it out [1]. 0 - https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2023/03/22/gitlab-15-10-released/#explore-projects-groups-snippets-and-topics https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2023/03/22/gitlab-15-10-re... 1 - https://gitlab.com/explore/projects/trending https://gitlab.com/explore/projects/trending
  • praptak 4y ago
    It's a personal blog. The author has no obligation to keep it to the standard of a trade magazine. Blogs are supposed to be subjective and it's okay for a blog post to be harsh if the author feels so.
    • alex_suzuki 4y ago
      Sure. Just saying that for me personally, it’s a turn-off and makes me take the article less seriously.
      • gyranthology 4y ago
        For me it's not just the lack of professionalism but the writing makes the author sound pretty junior and inexperienced with how the world works. Not that there's anything wrong with that (we've all been there). But it can cheapen the discussion and feel like what really needs to be untangled is overlooked by stuff like "I was upset because they changed the UI and then I got used to it." Not very interesting details and not very useful thing to discuss.
    • keithalewis 4y ago
      [flagged]
  • npinsker 4y ago
    I appreciated the specific word choice there; 'disgusting' implies a strong, visceral reaction, as if to say GitLab's work is so far from the author's taste that it blocks them from considering the product, and didn't seem all that harsh if that's how the author actually feels. In a counterintuitive way, it was nice to read -- it says that UI is important; that it shouldn't be an afterthought; that it has the power to actively invite people in or greatly repulse them instead.
    • swyx 4y ago
      what is so bad about the UI/UX? i'm not a frequent gitlab user but it doesnt strike me as anything out of the ordinary
      • npinsker 4y ago
        A few things I personally don't like: - Use of space: GitLab has more empty space across the site. Elements have a bit too much padding for my tastes and are spaced a bit too far apart. Valuable screen space (top center) contains a lot of needless information on GitLab (table headers, project ID, language breakdown, a prompt to add a CONTRIBUTING file) which is either not present or located off to the side on GitHub. - Color and typography: GitHub is one of the best sites at this, using pops of color for important buttons and really fun typography. I love how GitHub has your avatar "speak" a commit description, it's a great little touch. GitLab's design feels like it has less personality. Quick comparison: https://imgur.com/a/Ejd1Q1X https://imgur.com/a/Ejd1Q1X - Attention to detail: A bit less of it on GitLab -- icons and text don't vertically align in some places; several of the dropdown menus could use a bit of visual improvement, or have an ill-fitting item or two; in my screenshot above, GitLab's "Commit message" and "Target Branch" have inconsistent capitalization.
      • xigoi 4y ago
        The main page has a huge prominent “Get Free Trial” button, while the “Sign In” button is small and hidden in the menu. A common dark pattern. The performance is sluggish. There's always a lot of buttons and stuff on the screen that most users will probably never use, making the UI cluttered.
  • bdcravens 4y ago
    The author is a college freshman, and that seems pretty par for the course for someone in their late teens. It's not really an "article" targeted for HN critical review, just a blog post on a personal site.
    • jimnotgym 4y ago
      This is what I noticed too. We have a kid with no experience in the real world telling us what they think. Why should we care? I actually don't
      • ChatGTP 4y ago
        Nice display of arrogance there.
  • kmac_ 4y ago
    Yeah, I agree that some words could be choosed better, but overall it changed my mind over the use of GPL licenced code. Copilot and other ML tools should not use GPL trained models to create proprietary licenced code.
  • T3RMINATED 4y ago
    [dead]
• majkinetor 4y ago
  Perhaps a variant of Eternal September...
• aetherspawn 4y ago
  Why hasn't someone just changed the GPL license already: "If you train an AI on this code, you must release the source code and generated neural net of that AI as open source" or something to that effect. It won't stop it, but it will slow it down, and it seems like the right T&Cs to put on training against GPL code because it gives an advantage to open source AIs, however minor.
  • jacquesm 4y ago
    They are really not going to care about what you put into your license file, they are just going to claim that the use of GitHub binds you to their terms of service and that this supersedes your own license. Good luck fighting that.
    • ethbr0 4y ago
      ToS doesn't supercede copyright though, does it? The real rub will be the first court precedent on whether GPTs infringe on source data IP. Could see it going either way: fundamentally transformative or not.
      • ratherbefuddled 4y ago
        > ToS doesn't supercede copyright though, does it? But in what way does reading a copyrighted work and then producing a mass of numbers as a result infringe copyright?
        • feanaro 4y ago
          The copyright infringement comes about later, when that mass of numbers is used to produce a topically related work. The same rules apply for humans -- see the concept of "clean room implementation".
          • ratherbefuddled 4y ago
            It really doesn't. Prose isn't source code. Learning something, then later writing something else isn't copying.
• gman83 4y ago
  Q: What about the social features of GitHub? I enjoy the discovery and star features. There just isn't any community like it. Where can I get that? It would be great if there was something that had the discovery & social aspects but was agnostic to the actual site hosting the code. Does something like that exist?
  • Hasnep 4y ago
    Forgejo [1] is working on integrating activitypub [2] which will let instances federate with each other. [1] https://forgejo.org/ https://forgejo.org/ [2] https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59 https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59
    • amir734jj 4y ago
      +1 for Forgejo
  • edwcross 4y ago
    Maybe some day Software Heritage (https://www.softwareheritage.org/ https://www.softwareheritage.org/) will expose enough metadata between repositories so that people will be able to train their own recommenders for better discovery.
• ChatGTP 4y ago
  My instincts are giving me similar feelings. It’s time to move on. This has probably been the play for longer than we’d like to admit. Ingest everyone’s code and sell it back to us at a price. Fools will be soon voluntarily uploading whole code bases and any novel solutions they have left. These solutions will then be then ALT+Tab’ed into the competitions editors for a small fee…wow and lol.
• ianbutler 4y ago
  I tend to disregard articles that default to the "Stochastic Parrot" argument. These tools are useful now, I don't personally care about achieving actual intelligence. I want additional utility for myself and other humans, which these provide now, at scale. By a lot of measures many humans perform at just about the same level, including confidently making up bullshit. This post reads like one of the "Goodbye X online video game" posts. I'll cut them some slack because this is their blog they're venting on and was likely posted here by someone else and not themselves doing some attention seeking, but meh.
  • LASR 4y ago
    It’s pretty ironic that the argument that LLMs are stochastic parrots actually sounds like the actual parrot. I think we’re now way past that now with LLMs now quickly taking on the role of a general reasoning engine.
    • shrimpx 4y ago
      LLMs suck at deduction and factual reasoning. How are they reasoning engines?
    • cowl 4y ago
      > now quickly taking on the role of a general reasoning engine And this right here is why it's important to emphasize the "stochastic parrot" fact. Because people think this is true and are making decisions based on this misunderstanding.
      • FeepingCreature 4y ago
        Or maybe they just disagree with you?
        • cowl 4y ago
          Who? See: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3442188.3445922 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3442188.3445922 A 2021 research paper warning (among other things) precisly about this confusion. > The ersatz fluency and coherence of LMs raises several risks, precisely because humans are prepared to interpret strings belonging to languages they speak as meaningful and corresponding to the communicative intent of some individual or group of individuals who have accountability for what is said Is there any Researcher who maintains that LLM models contain Reasoning and intent? Those who are working on this models are not confused, they know what they are, the Public is confused.
• bottlepalm 4y ago
  Is there really anything ‘unique’ about the code we write on a line or even function level? It all feels like plumbing to me. It’s how you put it all together that makes what you create with it unique and special. Copilot so far has generally just figured out what I was going to type next anyways without it, nothing mind blowing, but super helpful.
  • alpaca128 4y ago
    While I don't think MS has the right to just ignore copyright I think this is closer to the idea of code reuse than previous approaches where someone had to choose a specific level of granularity and abstraction and hope the result can be effectively used without any change.
• ipsum2 4y ago
  Unfortunately moving to Gitlab or Sourcehut doesn't really help, because the underlying model (GPT-x) is trained on the entire internet, so that includes all scrape-able websites. The only way for your data not to be used in GPT (and therefore Copilot) is to not to put it on any website or make it very difficult to access, like encrypting it.
  • TranquilMarmot 4y ago
    Is that such a bad thing? I write code to get it out there, not for it to be exclusive or something. Any code that I write that helps somebody else in some way is a huge win for me and what keeps me going. If I could, _all_ of the code that I write would be open source or public but as-is the best way to make a living for me is to write closed-source code. I see my code getting scraped by these AI tools as me having contributed to something greater than the sum of its parts. And I use it! My code helps you, your code helps me.
  • philipphutterer 4y ago
    Not sure about this, but training a model on the website that displays the code is not quite the same as training it specifically on just the code. Moreover, (raw) repo content files might not even be included in crawled datasets (e.g., look at https://gitlab.com/robots.txt https://gitlab.com/robots.txt). I think there is something specific to GitHub as it being part of Microsoft that makes processing that data much easier.
  • tommyage 4y ago
    > Unfortunately moving to Gitlab or Sourcehut doesn't really help, because the underlying model (GPT-x) is trained on the entire internet, so that includes all scrape-able websites. The only way for your data not to be used in GPT (and therefore Copilot) is to not to put it on any website or make it very difficult to access, like encrypting it. Having the entire git history decorates specific chunks (at least entire commits) with context by the commit message. So you may not only process the entire repo at one specific state in time, but the entire history in at this point in time. There is valuable knowledge while making sense of it; But this is not accessible to us. It relies in the knowledge base of one company (or two).
• bruce511 4y ago
  I'm gonna get hated on for this, but I don't think "give back" is an open source concept. I'm not aware of any Open Source license,or Free license for that matter,that has a give-back clause. Source code is available to -users- ,not prior-authors. Some Open Source licenses can be used in proprietary code, (MIT, BSD etc) with little more than simple attribution. Those developers chose that license for a reason, and I've got no problem with commercial entities using that code. There is a valid argument to be made about the training of models on GPL code. (Argument in the sense that there's two sides to the coin.) On the one hand we happily train humans on GPL code. Those humans can then write their own functions,but for trivial functions they're gonna look a lot like GPL Source. If the AI is regurgitating GPL code as-is, then that's a problem- not dissimilar to a student or employee regurgitating the same code. But this argument is about Free software licenses,not really (most?) Open Source licenses. Either way OSS/Free is not about "giving back",its about giving forward. In the specific case here of co-pilot making money,I'd say A) you're allowed to make money from Free/OSS code. B) no one is forcing you to use this feature.
  • japhyr 4y ago
    No need to hate on you for a valid response. I think we're in a new enough situation that we can look beyond what's legal in a license. When many of us started working on open source projects, AI was a far-off concept. Speaking for myself, I thought we'd see steady improvement in code-completion tools, but I didn't think I'd see anything like GPT-4 in my lifetime. Licenses were written for humans working with code. We can talk about corporations as well, but when I've thought about corporations in the past, I thought about people working on code at corporations. The idea of an AI using my open source project to generate working code for someone or some corporation feels...different. Yes, I'm talking explicitly about feelings. I know my feelings don't impact the legalities of a license. But feelings are worth talking about, especially as we're all finding the boundaries of new tools and new ways of working. I don't agree with everything in the post, but I think this is a great conversation to be having.
    • bruce511 4y ago
      I agree that AI usage of code is somewhat murky with current licenses,which obviously don't mention it either way. Free software has a principle of "freedom to run, to do whatever you wish" (freedom 0), so arguably has said that training AI is OK. (We could quibble over the word Run, but the Gnu.org,and RMS clearly say "freedom 0 does not restrict how you use it." GPL code can be used by the military to develop nuclear weapons. Given that the is a guiding principle of the FSF its hard to argue that the current usage is not OK.
• fariszr 4y ago
  > The code that was regurgitated by the model is marketed as "AI generated" and available for use for any project you want. Including proprietary ones. It's laundering open-source code. All of the decades of knowledge and uncountable hours of work is being, well, stolen. There is nothing being given back. Leaving GitHub wont change that, OpenAI is training its models on every bit of code they can have, sourcehut, codeberg etc. If its public, they will train on it. Also from my experience of trying to leave GitHub, you just end up having a couple of projects on your alternative platform, and everything else on GitHub. You are still active on GitHub, probably even more than your new alternative. And if you want to build a community, you will quickly find out that the majority want to stick to GitHub, and leaving it can kill your projects chances of getting contributions. Personally if the courts decide its fair use, that's it, I'm going back, its the best got platform out there, gitlab doesn't even compare in free features. However I have been eyeing Gitea and Gitea Actions, with it Codeberg could become a realistic choice for me. To end it, here is a Hot take, I really hate Sourcehut. it hard to use, the ui is .. Not great and trying to browse issues or latest commits is a nightmare. Every time a project uses it, its a pain to deal with.
  • sjamaan 4y ago
    > Also from my experience of trying to leave GitHub, you just end up having a couple of projects on your alternative platform, and everything else on GitHub. > And if you want to build a community, you will quickly find out that the majority want to stick to GitHub, and leaving it can kill your projects chances of getting contributions. That's a defeatist attitude and a self-fulfilling prophecy at the same time. As more and more people leave GitHub (hopefully not to go to the same alternative), it becomes less and less of a must-have. The reason these things are somewhat true today is because of the network effect, and it's precisely that effect which we must actively attempt to squash by leaving.
    • mattlutze 4y ago
      Parent is talking about a fundamental feature of networks. A denser and larger network has much more useful network-related features, and if one company has a significant majority of the total addressable market for a network, it's a massive ask for people to extricate themselves and rebuild a network somewhere else. It's why Facebook is still on top even though everyone hated it for a while; YouTube is the *only video platform, etc.
• kookamamie 4y ago
  > It's a stochastic parrot Stopped reading right there. The author clearly has no clue of how neural networks work or what makes them tick.
  • autophagian 4y ago
    Do you have any resources you'd recommend to form a better understanding of how NNs tick? I'd like to get a better intuitive grasp on whats going on - I've mostly just been responding to that with "Well, if stochastic parrotism can do all this..."
    • pcthrowaway 4y ago
      At this point, anyone using the term "stochastic parrot" is just giving credence to my personal belief that humans are also stochastic parrots.
      • autophagian 4y ago
        I mean, its probably a component (or an approximation of a component) of what we do, at some level. Christ knows I've felt like a stochastic parrot when I'm zoning out 3 hours into a meeting and someone asks me a question out of the blue. I probably have a smaller context window at those points than GPT3 does...
      • runald 4y ago
        A more apt term would be delusional parrot, applies both to the LLM and to everyone else who thinks GPT is the second coming of Jesus.
    • probably_wrong 4y ago
      In case you haven't seen it yet, the term "stochastic parrot" got introduced by this paper [1] titled "On the danger of stochastic parrots". A related paper [2] titled "Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data" got awarded Best Paper by the Assoc. for Computational Linguistics and it's also easier to read. Those two papers are critical of LLMs and discuss what researchers believe that they can and cannot do. I don't say that you need to agree with them but I think reading them should give you a good primer on why some researchers are not as excited as HN users are. [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922 [2] https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.463/ https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.463/
• bigpeopleareold 4y ago
  You don't give up GitHub as long as you're employed in many companies that have accepted it and are looking for information on pretty much most open source software these days. The only thing is to just host your own projects elsewhere. I did this a long time ago because I was unhappy over GitHub's interface. I am realizing further that all I need is a web page and a link on my personal web site. If I really wanted to publish a project, I'd probably find other avenues. I think SourceHut does look nice if I cared enough. In some cases, "GitHub" has become a required skill in some jobs now (not git, mind you, but _GitHub_). I personally fumbled a little bit when I was asked that - what is it? The CI/CD stuff specifically, or the "using git" part which is the skill? :) I was a bit befuddled.
  • jacooper 4y ago
    I have heard from some people that many companies specifically ask for your github profile, in many places only the user tag, not a link which can be changed to gitlab or something else. So it will effect your job chances, even if the job has nothing to do with managing GitHub.
    • bigpeopleareold 4y ago
      Thankfully that hasn't happened for me, yet. Or maybe that could be my own selection criteria - an active GitHub account should not be a prerequisite to get any type of computer job. If the hiring manager is serious about me, they can find the URL in my GitHub profile.
    • toastal 4y ago
      I've done a little bit of helping with hiring and I always interject that it should be links to code forges.
• senko 4y ago
  "When I was young I found X. It was wonderful and full of stars! As I grew up, things changed, but I stayed with X because I was used to it. Finally, Y happened and I have to leave X because I really dislike Y. Goodbye! (ps. I'm not actually leaving because I want to be involved with things that are still going on there, but I want it to be known I don't really like X anymore)" Replace X with GitHub, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Usenet, IRC, ... this is an archetypal growing up and facing change in the world story.
  • blackarck 4y ago
    have seen this type of advertisement for Y product lot lately. You don't have to bash one product just to advertise another one. AI is not going away; you either embrace it now or after a few years. With its usage, it will evolve and get better with time, both as a product and the solutions they provide
  • zelphirkalt 4y ago
    > Replace X with GitHub, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Usenet, IRC, ... this is an archetypal growing up and facing change in the world story. It might have the same structure, but that is merely a grammatical structure or maybe reason structure. It does say nothing about the actual reasons themselves. We should not dismiss an argument just for following a well known structure. For all of the things you listed there can be valid reasons to leave them and those could be put in that structure or another typical one. I think it becomes even more natural to have that structure, if we consider the "flow" of time. Of course things are going to change. But that does not invalidate the argument at all. Maybe you only wanted to highlight the structure. I don't know that. I merely want to mention, that arguments should not be dismissed purely based on their structure.
• SanderNL 4y ago
  If someone says "stochastic parrot" as an argument I know they have no idea what they are talking about. That's calling a human a bunch of cells. It's true, but you are losing track of the (astronomical amount of) emergent properties.
• tarkin2 4y ago
  I stopped a while back. And now I'm unsure what I think given the AI revelations. On the hand MS gave a great product to programmers for free, and on the other they've used the code therein to do a lot of junior programmers out of their future jobs, and then again this will increase the productivity of many programmers, for a profit. It's hard to be too critical yet I'm no fan either.
• nl 4y ago
  See I've been doing Open Source for a long time and I love that GitHub/OpenAI/Microsoft is training on my code. I want it to be helpful. I'd prefer to run my own version, but we are I guess between 3 and 6 months from having competitive open offerings. When I write open source code I'm serious about the open, non-discriminatory nature of it.
  • saurik 4y ago
    FWIW, that's great for your intentions with "open source code", but some people--like myself--in fact explicitly placed licenses on our code (and additionally did not even upload it to GitHub ourselves: our code is open source and of course anyone can edit it in public and redistribute it) that add "discriminatory" clauses as we aren't merely being purely altruistic: we are attempting to help provide code as ammunition in a war against developers who would attempt to lock users out of control over their own technology. When you put your code under GPL (as I explicitly and actively chose to; or to put your content under something like the Creative Commons ShareAlike license, which I've explicitly used for many photos I've distributed over the years) you are purposefully choosing to help only those people who are willing to agree to the same level of open-ness in their products. And, as a reader, you know that if you read my code and "learn" from it, you are tainting yourself in a way that might make it difficult to later defend yourself from claims I might make. To the extent to which it is legal for Copilot to train a model off my code as it might be fair use as some kind of transformative work, I want to be clear that I do not at all believe it is legal for someone to USE Copilot to write software that might be similar to my software... at least without having their lawyers carefully vet the resulting code it generates to determine that none of the expressive intent of my code has managed to leak through Copilot's attempt to launder my code as the user attempts to "autocomplete" something similar.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• philholden 4y ago
  US copyright office seems to say anything written by AI cannot be copyrighted. Also a work that does not disclose which parts are AI generated cannot be copyrighted. All open source licences and creative commons are based on copyright. If you do not own the copyright you cannot release code under MIT. As far as I can tell no one is labeling which parts of code used AI. Most devs I know are using Chat GPT at least for inspiration in solving problems. Pretty sure soon almost every file will have snippets of AI code. Companies have little control to stop this. So to me it looks like every company is unknowingly making its codebase public domain. Open AI caches its responses so can scan private codebases to know which use AI. Copilot also knows which codebases use AI. If they find a codebase that uses AI but does not disclose where it is used then that codebase can be used for further AI training. Major companies will need to use copilot x, vscode and github to remain competitive. So microsoft could end up sucking up all the proprietary knowledge of every industry.
  • thepostman0 4y ago
    Competitive at what? Templating?
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• encryptluks2 4y ago
  [dead]
• brutusurp 4y ago
  Have to say, I agree with the author. It should be super easy for us to select "don't use my data" on anything we own - Github accounts, websites, anything that has our real identity attached to it. With 2FA our identities are attached to Github accounts. Further it should be equally as easy to check training data across all models to ensure our data is not included. Glad to learn about SourceHut. I'll check it out.
• serverlessmania 4y ago
  No sense getting to the front page…
  • toastal 4y ago
    Hacker News is like a book club: the articles are catalysts for discussion—and clearly a lot of folks have things to say
• friend_and_foe 4y ago
  I abandoned github the day that they (and others, including people here) started arguing that their ToS trumps your code's license. That's absurd. It's authoritarian, it's hostile, it's an act of enmity. Fuck all that bullshit. I do business with no entity, period, that treats me with that level of disdain.
  • Tryk 4y ago
    Never heard of this, that's quite shocking. Do you have any source?
  • saurik 4y ago
    Yeah and it's like, nonsensical for the service: if you are working in open source, the reality is that a lot of the time you are working with software you don't own. I develop a lot of software, and the vast majority of it was open source... but I've only ever put two projects of mine on GitHub (and one only because I was working with some other people and I essentially got outvoted ;P). And yet, if you search for my code, I'm sure you can find almost all of it on GitHub, because it was open source and other people wanted to be able to edit it or even merely redistribute it... which I'd have said is there right, but I guess not if supposedly that overrides the license on the software? Or like, if this were the case, how would one expect some large/old open source project with a ton of prior contributions--which is normally fine as everyone has the same rights under the license and so you just all mix your code together and are happy: you don't actually need some central organization with ownership until you want to change the license (which is something many people explicitly don't want to ever happen)--to be hosted on GitHub? Even simpler: most of Google's code is open source--such as the Android Open Source Project, or Chromium--but they don't host it officially on GitHub... I guess it isn't OK for anyone to work on this stuff on GitHub either, right?
    • friend_and_foe 4y ago
      Yup, and this contrived conundrum is proof positive of a truth: all code is licensed before the ToS is agreed to, whether published or not. Licenses override ToS, which means that Microsoft needs to remove all code on github either due to ToS violations, since their ToS directly contradicts all licenses, or because the licenses contradict their ToS. What it comes down to is that the Github ToS is illegal.
• infinitedata 4y ago
  People is so melodramatic. Yes this is the future, yes AI is scary, but this is it. Whether you like it or not, technology and life can continue without you. We could very well be living in what Intelligence from another era lead to and it is happening all over again. Life is short, enjoy the ride.
  • ChatGTP 4y ago
    "We could very well be living in what Intelligence from another era lead to and it is happening all over again." Very unclear statement...
• eviks 4y ago
  Why don't the alternative projects just copy the good old github interface instead of starting from a bad scratch, scaring the transitioning devs off?
  • Narann 4y ago
    I'm sure there are others, but Codeberg is exactly this: https://codeberg.org/ https://codeberg.org/
    • eviks 4y ago
      Yes, that's a good example (and the author also mentioned this), but then there is sr.ht
  • layer8 4y ago
    Copyright could be an issue. Also, they may not agree that the GitHub interface is “good”.
    • eviks 4y ago
      I'm not sure © blocks, see Codeberg that is pretty close. Have you seen an example of an interface that is better?
      • layer8 4y ago
        I haven’t really looked around, but the GitHub interface is rather bad as far as I’m concerned. I’m not sure how Codeberg would fare if GitHub sued them for copying their design. I guess GitHub doesn’t really care as long as they’re the king of the hill.
• midasuni 4y ago
  If someone were to break Microsoft licensing terms and give me a copy of windows code Then if I read that and built my own understanding Then if I used that knowledge to implement my own version of windows that was compatible with Microsoft’s and distributed it under my own license Would that be legal? WINE etc are built in clean room environments for good reasons.
  • fsflover 4y ago
    This. It shouldn't matter whether copyright violation was generated by a human brain or via an instrument (AI). ReactOS developers also rely on clean room approach: https://reactos.org/wiki/ReactOS_FAQ#Is_ReactOS_based_on_Microsoft_Windows.E2.84.A2_original_source_code.3F https://reactos.org/wiki/ReactOS_FAQ#Is_ReactOS_based_on_Mic...
  • aap_ 4y ago
    You can find the Windows XP source code publicly on github right now. So I'm not sure how serious MS actually is about this...
• adamors 4y ago
  Not trying to Ad Hominem, but why should anyone care that university freshman is moving away from Github? This is essentially blogspam.
  • mixmastamyk 4y ago
    Have to read it yourself to decide if the reasoning appeals to you.
• lionkor 4y ago
  if someone misuses code people put a lot of time into, they may eventually get cease & desist and then sued, especially open source code under licenses like GPL. I don't care for AI ethics, its simply a breach of copyright to take my code and reuse it somewhere (theres a lot of my code that isnt licensed at all on GH). Since OpenAI can't guarantee it wont breach licenses or copyright, it should simply not allow code questions, the same way it doesnt allow sexual or illegal content "just in case". But wait, no, that one's too much of a money cow. I'm sure it would happily reproduce 1:1 a piece of leaked source code some company owns, and OpenAI would tell you their hands are tied and theres nothing they can do. Of course, when it comes to making sure it doesnt say "fuck" or any variation of it, that instead seems a high priority. And people go defending it, as if theres nothing OpenAI could do. Yes people are also trained on code, but people generally dont have the capacity to remember 1:1 a 50+ line function, and if they do, they can likely remember the license, too. Its a non-argument. And then, to top it all off, tell me with a straight face that people have not gotten in trouble for writing a similar enough work, e.g. in academia.
• ertucetin 4y ago
  My only concern is whether GitHub is training on private repos or not. That would be the main problem, but I guess we will never know.
• DrBazza 4y ago
  > I feel like GitHub has lost that magic. Am I the only person that used Github for what it was? A place to push and pull my repos from my CLI? That hasn't changed. I rarely use the website.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• Incipient 4y ago
  I vaguely get what the author is saying, but I think "give back" is the end result, not the issue. The vast majority of people don't give back. It's exposure. When GPT uses code from stack overflow, you don't see the community, so there isn't any possibility to engage with it; essentially starving the community.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• nirui 4y ago
  > Well, there just aren't many places I can go. I could go to GitLab, but they have their own fair share of issues and a disgusting UI/UX. Not sure when was the last time the author checked them out, GitLab had a bad UI, but they've some improvements done during the recent times. IMO they are pretty OK now (still not as good as GitHub, that is I don't even think GitHub has good UI). But SourceHut is a nice pick anyway :)
  • john_cogs 4y ago
    GitLab team member here. Thanks for the feedback. Beautifying our UI [0] is an ongoing effort and usability improvements [1] are specifically mentioned in the product investment themes for this fiscal year. 0 - https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/7781 https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/7781 1 - https://about.gitlab.com/direction/#world-class-devsecops-experience https://about.gitlab.com/direction/#world-class-devsecops-ex...
• jhanschoo 4y ago
  I think the author hasn't considered this: I believe Copilot is trained on not only OSS on GitHub but also proprietary software. In terms of reproduction by Copilot, Copilot is not licensed to distribute OSS without license just as it is not licensed to distribute proprietary software. To any extent that OSS authors have a case against Copilot, so too do proprietary software authors, and likely moreso. If there is indeed a case against Copilot reproducing code, I'd expect it to be championed by well-financed corporations foremost.
• natch 4y ago
  The greater good here is what tools like GPT in its various flavors and interfaces are offering. Learning is good, not bad. Get a grip.
• HenriTEL 4y ago
  To be honest I never really believed in the original business model: - subscriptions for companies and proprietary software - Deals with 3rd party integrations It's cheaper and not more difficult to self-host most parts now a day, and improving (k8s, helm charts, things like flux and gitlab). The hard part being to actually write those integrations (github actions). You also have more flexibility as you can run whatever code you want on your infra. So it was a matter of time that things would change (less features for free tiers, ads or another way to make money out of the user base, like with copilot)
• bastardoperator 4y ago
  My git client can talk to any remote origin, who cares? Good on this kid for the clout chase though. Being upset with AI is just comedy at this point...
• schizo89 4y ago
  There's github for decentralized era: https://radicle.xyz/ https://radicle.xyz/
• thoughtsbykean 4y ago
  Github has too many open source resources for people to get up and quit. Code repositories on github are akin to google services; the logo may not be there but the foundations seep through to our existing products.
  • themusicgod1 4y ago
    Code on github is not open source, end of story.
• madeofpalk 4y ago
  > I feel like GitHub has lost that magic. I'm willing to bet that GitHub itself hasnt lost "that magic". What's happened is: - internet and development communities have matured. The types of 'fun' that's happening is different, but it's no less magic - author got older
• dahwolf 4y ago
  I think AI is here to stay (obviously) but we do need a much better permission model regarding content, whether this is the writing on your blog, your digital art, your open source code, video, audio...all of it. The current model basically says that as soon as you publish something, others can pretty much do with it as they please under the disguise of "fair use", an aggressive ToS, the like. I stand by the author that the current model is parasitic. You take the sum of human-produced labor, knowledge and intelligence without permission or compensation, centralize this with tech about 2 companies have or can afford, and then monetize it. Worse, in a way that never even attributes or refers to the original content. Half-quitting Github will not do anything, instead we need legal reform in this age of AI. We need training permission control as none of today's licenses were designed with AI in mind. The default should be no permission where authors can opt-in per account and/or per piece of content. No content platform's ToS should be able to override this permission with a catch-all clause, it should be truly free consent. Ideally, we'd include monetization options where conditional consent is given based on revenue sharing. I realize that this is a less practical idea as there's still no simple internet payment infrastructure, AI companies likely will have enough non-paid content to train, plus it doesn't solve the problem of them having deep pockets to afford such content, thus they keep their centralization benefits. The more likely outcome is that content producers increasingly withdraw into closed paid platforms as the open web is just too damn hostile. I find none of this to be anti-AI, it's pro-human and pro-creator.
  • Cthulhu_ 4y ago
    An important legislative step for this is that anyone creating and publishing an AI learning model needs to be able to cite their sources - in this case, a list of all the github repositories and files therein, along with their licenses. If that is made mandatory, only then can these lists actually be checked against licenses. There will also need to be a trial license, to establish whether an AI learning model can be considered derived from a licensed open source project - and therefore whether it falls under the license. And finally, we'll likely get updated versions of the various OSS licenses that include a specific statement on e.g. usage within AI / machine learning.
  • welshwelsh 4y ago
• Mizoguchi 4y ago
  Github was always private and their founders had already sold other companies to Microsoft, so it's hard to understand how anyone could be shocked and disappointed when they sold Github as well. Copilot is great IMO, so good it feels almost like cheating, but if you are so broke that you cannot come up with $10 a month then don't use it, you can still use Github though.
• FredPret 4y ago
  I recently rolled out my first full software product. Some of my code is OK to be open-sourced, and some isn't. I considered GitHub, but it's just too Microsoft-y now. I ended up rolling out a Gitea instance. It doesn't have feature parity but at least my code is on my server and there aren't any AI's / MS employees reading it (I hope!)
• esskay 4y ago
  I'm not sure people need to announce their departure from GitHub. You may not like their use of AI but legally speaking its entirely within their right to update their TOS for this. Is it sketchy? Absolutely. But given over the years they've provided billions of dollars of hosting and compute services to the opensource community for free I'm not sure there can be much of an argument that they don't have a right to create a sustainable income source. They undoubtely should have handled it better, perhaps even offering an option for individual repos to opt out entirely. But if they didn't do it, someone else would have.
  • jmclnx 4y ago
    >I'm not sure people need to announce their departure from GitHub. I think people should if they are leaving for reasons described in the article, or other reasons due to Microsoft. If enough people leave there is a very remote hope Microsoft its ways. FWIW, I have been waiting for that to happen for well over 30 years :)
• sneak 4y ago
  Why do people believe that giving a gift (releasing free software) obligates the recipients of those gifts? This idea that open source code can be "stolen" is insane. You can't steal a gift. Once you give it away, it is no longer yours.
  • eviks 4y ago
    Maybe for the same reason people believe in reciprocity with actual gifts and in other areas of human interaction?
• yokoprime 4y ago
  Has HN become an airport now that we are broadcasting departures? This article is interesting on a personal level if you know the author, but his reasons are not something most users care about and him moving on is not something I will think about at all
• sylware 4y ago
  I kept my github account to report issues on the projects still on github. Even though github is own by the untrustable msft, it (still) does work with noscript/basic (x)html browsers (well I created my account probably a decade ago). gitlab: I cannot even create an account.
  • themusicgod1 4y ago
    Stop reporting issues to github.
    • sylware 4y ago
      Tell valve to move to another noscript/basic (x)html friendly source code and issue reporting site then. Yep, I have a sin: I play native elf/linux games.
    • sylware 4y ago
      Just had to report a bug on the alsa-lib... and it has to be done on github. Ok, we have a situation here. Critical/significant open source components going on sites which should be avoided. There are noscript/basic (x)html alternatives. Why those are not chosen??
• nemo44x 4y ago
  Anyone who refuses to embrace these AI tools will simply not be able to compete. As new tools and tech appear in any trade you more or less have no choice but to embrace them.
• toastal 4y ago
  Recently I noticed if you try to search a project’s “code” on Microsoft GitHub while unauthenticated, you’ll get `?` results and be prompted to log in to see anything.
• elif 4y ago
  I have also been using GitHub since the early octocat days (2009?). But never saw it as this magical place the blog describes. Consider that we concurrently had access to really magical feeling collaborative open source tools like ruby gems and npm. By comparison, Sourceforge felt way more magical during it's generation. What WAS and IS magical, is git, as a fully distributed, has everything you need but not too much, beautiful repository with easy to use history editing to cultivate sensible code trees. The only magic from GitHub imo was that it made git the defacto standard when we could easily be stuck using svn today. As for his points about AI being against the philosophy of open source, I imagine he will have the ear of RMS and a few other absolutists, but in my personal experience AI assistance has lit a fire of individual empowerment for the little guy wanting to take on big projects so bright that I think it is the single best thing we have left to save open source. It is a new wave of open source, and we can collaborate with 100% of the population instead of 5%.
• Guid_NewGuid 4y ago
  My thoughts on the co-pilot thing remain as vague as ever but I made something of a connection reading this: > GPL violations by soulless corporations stealing the hard work of independent programmers and assimilating it into their own proprietary software "stealing"? Where's it gone? It vanished!? It's been erased from the internet? Why do we play these semantic artificial scarcity games with code that has deliberately been made publicly accessible? If I read your code and copy it to a file on my computer it hasn't been destroyed, it hasn't gone anywhere. If my computer reads the code it hasn't vanished into the ether. I don't pirate films/games/TV/books but I think open source code is an entirely different beast to the former.
• mikewarot 4y ago
  I think the "laundering" charge works both ways. While it is true that it will help some leverage work that went into GPL projects for new non-GPL projects, it is more important to know that it provides cover from accidentally importing copyrighted material from Microsoft, et al, into GPL projects. While the value of the trade might not be fair, the cost that legions of corporate "Intellectual Property" lawyers can force upon the lone open source developer are a far larger drag on development.
• robinhood 4y ago
  I maintain a popular OSS project which code is hosted on Github [1]. The entire "Github doesn't give back" argument is wrong. For "free", Github lets me host our code, run thousands and thousands of hours of free CI (and we are aggressively using it), host releases and docker images, and lets us manage thousands of issues. Also, Copilot is free when you are eligible to it, so we are fortunate enough to not have to pay for it as well. Yes, they monetize our attention and train Copilot with the code, but the only argument which can't be used against this company is that they don't give back. [1]: https://github.com/monicahq/monica https://github.com/monicahq/monica
• usrbinbash 4y ago
  > That there was nothing being given back. Out of curiosity: How much does keeping github afloat cost per anno? And not just afloat, but fast, reliable, secure and convenient. And now we factor in how many users github has, and how many of them use it for free. Hell, I'm sure more than a few companies use it for free. Microsoft is a corporation. Corporations want to make money. This is hardly a secret, and they can hardly be blamed for it. If people want to use a free offering of a company, well, then they have to be aware that the company in all likelyhood in some way benefits from that free offering as well. Because all that compute, all that bandwidth, all that storage, and all the people developing & maintaining it, don't come for free either. If I don't like it, I either have to use an alternative run by a different company, or setup my own git server.
• bvan 4y ago
  Microsoft eventually shits on everything, so this was predictable. The spirit of open source is orthogonal to that of corporate interests.
• theusus 4y ago
  I am totally against GitHub using public code, but not permissible licence. I too to want to move out of it.
  • toastal 4y ago
    nudge
• 29athrowaway 4y ago
  Feeling betrayed by Microsoft? Well, you should have learned your lesson the first time.
• gavinhoward 4y ago
  I am someone that also left GitHub. [1] To the author, yes, it's worth it. I didn't go to another service, though; I set up Gitea on my own server. Because of drama there, I'm going to have to replace Gitea as well. But GitLab itself is going down the drain, I'm not welcome on SourceHut, and I haven't heard the best things about Codeberg. Also, git needs a replacement. [1]: https://gavinhoward.com/2020/04/i-am-moving-away-from-github/ https://gavinhoward.com/2020/04/i-am-moving-away-from-github...
  • marcosdumay 4y ago
    I'm out of the loop. What drama has been with Gitea? (I'm not a bit willing to put my code on the likes of SourceHut or Codeberg. They are just new iterations on the Sourceforge/GitHub pattern that didn't go bad up to now. Besides, I like to keep the software I don't publish on my computers.)
    • gavinhoward 4y ago
      See https://gitea-open-letter.coding.social/ https://gitea-open-letter.coding.social/ . It should have links to more. Comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33372471 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33372471 .
      • marcosdumay 4y ago
        Oh, interesting. The silver lining seems to be that it forced the creation of a fork, promised to stay free, with actual documentation, and that doesn't force the docker bullshit upon installation. Looks like I'll finally upgrade from Gogs.
• JoeOfTexas 4y ago
  Does Copilot train on private projects too?
  • fallat 4y ago
    It's been proven that yeah it does. I suspect they've been retraining Copilot in the past months to have not made this initial training mistake.
• jokethrowaway 4y ago
  The main problem is that GitHub is becoming unreliable like the rest of the MS software (lead by Azure). Everything else is just business. At the same time I don't think it's smart to abandon GitHub for networking / CV reasons. Once I'll be rich enough, I'll delete my account and use a self hosted git server.
• naikrovek 4y ago
  well, GitHub isn't as "raw" as it used to be, that's for sure. It's much more user friendly now, much easier to make a single click and do what you need, like "copy to clipboard" or "download (a single file from a repo)" and so on. as things get easier to use, the coolness factor definitely goes down, and the pride you get from learning the tool goes down, because as things get easier to learn, the less special any given person is for learning that tool. There are software packages which intentionally remain complex to keep this feeling, and it's considered bad. From personal experience, if you want GitHub to feel like magic again, host an enterprise server instance on AWS and have over 10k active users. You will feel the complexity in your soul as you work out ways to monitor that thing effectively and react to problems before the symptoms get noticed by your extremely demanding users. I realize that very few people can do this, as GitHub Enterprise licenses are expensive, but hoo boy GitHub has not lost its magic for me.
• karmakaze 4y ago
  > For just $10 a month or $100 a year, you too can get programming help with no obligation to give back to anyone! I would say the use of trained data is "giving back" to all users of Copilot? The only thing that has to be considered is if the pricing is fair, and with all the competition in the space will be soon, or may already be below cost. Also in my opinion, not using open-source for programming aids is less freedom (libre)--without getting into specifics of compatibility of doing so with individual licenses.
• mvdl 4y ago
  I recognize your journey. Most of my GitHub work has gone stale and although I didn't say goodbye, most of my work is now on GitLab where it receives more love and care and where I am certain I could always move to a self hosted instance if GitLab decided to go in a direction that doesn't match my philosophy. GitHub has been an interesting ride, a place where I landed after sourceforge and codeplex went upside down. I felt at home until I didn't. Thank you GitHub for the great things we achieved.
• tanseydavid 4y ago
  OP: "it's a stochastic parrot" GPT-5: "I know you are, so what am I"
• skrbjc 4y ago
  AI tools like GitHub copilot are able to help “give back” to open source because open source developers can use them to be more productive.
• ethicalsmacker 4y ago
  The timing of this post is a bit uncanny. I left Github last week (removed all of my repositories) and made contributions private. I went further and removed all public mirrors on my personal site (along with all writing and projects on my site). I have been growing tired of the open source community in general and with a particular distaste for the Github community (and company as a whole). I won't get into all of my grievances and experiences simply because it doesn't matter and nothing will change. I decided to focus on creating things for myself. I don't need your stars, green check marks, crappy pull requests and endless issues. Maybe some day I will find the spark to open my personal site back up, but it feels unlikely.
• uconnectlol 4y ago
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• uconnectlol 4y ago
  [dead]
• steponlego 4y ago
  They took down Male Poon for no actual legal reason.