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> 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 lau

> 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.
  - toastal 4y ago
    But we are developers, not my grandma. We ‘know better’ but haven’t been doing enough about it.
    - fariszr 4y ago
      You are overestimating how many developers care about this really.
friend_and_foe 4y ago
I like sourcehut, I'm just not a fan of email oriented collaboration workflow, so I dont use it. And the rest of the world isn't either, if the success of github is anything to go by. I get that Drew likes it, the greybeards are used to it, it works, it's adequate, and it keeps things simple, but I just never could do it. I don't like git either tbh, I grumble while I use it. IMO the perfect collaboration suite would be something like fossil with RSS feeds for every action.
- toastal 4y ago
  I believe the goal is to build a minimal UI for those that don't prefer which is fine, but email & pull requests aren't the only model here. Look how much tooling is created to try to fit stack-based diffs atop Git+GitHub instead of using a different platform.
bsder 4y ago
> Every time a project uses it, its a pain to deal with. Sorry, but I consider that a plus. One of the primary problems with GitHub right now is the "drive by" nature. Everybody is on Github because a bunch of idiotic big corporations made "community contribution" part of their annual review processes so we now have a bunch of people who shouldn't be on GitHub throwing things around on there. Putting just a touch of friction into the comment/contribute cycle is a good thing. The people who contribute then have to want to contribute.
lofaszvanitt 4y ago
This whole open source thing is the biggest farce on planet Earth. Someone with a good knowledge about geeks and their behaviour concocted up this open source bullshit. So now talented people give their skill to the "whole" and they have to beg for contributions and donations to get by. And other geeks (not suits with ties) finance the ones they sympathise with. It's ridiculous. And faceless entities use their hard work for who knows what, but mostly to fatten up their already oversized corp and give back NOTHING. And people, seemingly without common sense suck up to companies that rob them, and even disseminate their shiny new "free" tools. This would be a Hugo-Nebula award winner novel if it wouldn't be reality.
- azangru 4y ago
  This is such a misrepresentation of the open-source landscape. Yes, there are people working on open-source projects who beg for donations; but there also are open-source projects maintained by full-time employees (Eleventy, paid by Netlify; React, paid by Facebook; Angular, paid by Google; Next.js, paid by Vercel; Linux, paid by various companies; etc.). If a person thinks that his efforts will be better compensated elsewhere, he can always start looking for a paid job.
  - lofaszvanitt 4y ago
    People should not beg for their work for a start. If you use it, you should pay for it. A small fee, or a fee that is set by the dev.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      I use a lot of open source software and directly pay for approximately none of it. Do you behave differently and pay for it today? What do you use to accomplish (track and manage) that?
      - lofaszvanitt 4y ago
        That's the problem there are no systems in place for it. So if there is no UI for payments on github, people will never stop for a moment to think about what they take for granted.
lelanthran 4y ago
> 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. Not every bit of code, they are respecting proprietary licenses. When MS puts the code for Windows, Office, Azure and everything else in front of ChatGPT, Copilot, whatever other AI learning model they have, then perhaps they have a leg to stand on. Otherwise, they're just being hypocritical to claim that no injury is being done by using code for training, because they are refusing to train on any of their code. Right now it just looks like they are ripping off open source licenses without meeting the terms of the license. https://www.lelanthran.com/chap7/content.html https://www.lelanthran.com/chap7/content.html
- Ajedi32 4y ago
  AFAIK that has nothing to do with the license, it has to do with whether the code is public. You don't want the AI accidentally revealing proprietary non-public information (e.g. imagine someone had a secret API key in a private repo and copilot leaked it; that'd be a huge incident), so you don't train it on that information, regardless of what it's licensed under. You could make a similar argument for not training on GPL code, but it's a lot easier to programmatically determine whether or not code is public than it is to programmatically determine what it's licensed under, particularly when you're training on massive amounts of unlabeled data. Not to mention it's way easier to delete an accidentally-added snippet of GPL code from a codebase than it is to "unleak" company secrets after they've been publicly revealed.
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    > Not to mention it's way easier to delete an accidentally-added snippet of GPL code from a codebase than it is to "unleak" company secrets after they've been publicly revealed. How often do you think anyone will notice that some part of a proprietary codebase is copied substantially from GPL code? I think it's going to be very rare and a lot of this code will fly under the radar. The GPL was always a kind of legal jiu-jitsu, turning copyright against itself and allowing non-commercial entities to protect themselves from uncompensated exploitation. Models like copilot, if they're legal, upend the status quo tremendously. Even though your code isn't (always) used directly, a commercial entity like Microsoft will slurp it up and sell the resulting model back to you for $9.99/mo.
galangalalgol 4y ago
I'm mostly familiar with gitlab, what does github provide for free above and beyond that? I like that I can run my gitlab pipeline on my machines and sync to a free gitlab instance. I like that I don't read about security vulnerabilities in gitlab pipelines nearly as often as github actions. I like gitlab issues as they are fairly minimal.
- fariszr 4y ago
  GitHub registry, GitHub actions and GitHub Codespaces are unlimited for public repos, in addition to all enterprise features. That's without talking about nice to have features like GitHub Sponsors, the for you tab, the (arguably) more popular UI layout, It's simply a better platform for Open source projects
muyuu 4y ago
I believe he just wants to do his bit by removing his activity from github towards lowering their dominance numbers in the space. I don't think he intends to stop those LLM code models.
rascul 4y ago
> gitlab doesn't even compare in free features. What features is GitLab missing? I don't know, I'm curious.
- fariszr 4y ago
  Unlimited package registry, unlimited Action run time, premium features unlocked and more. Also, the free tier on GitHub gives more for private repos too!, unlimited orgs, 2000 Ci minutes etc. It's just plain better, and It's because Microsoft can afford to play the long game, GitLab can't anymore.

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.
- toastal 4y ago
  But we are developers, not my grandma. We ‘know better’ but haven’t been doing enough about it.
  - fariszr 4y ago
    You are overestimating how many developers care about this really.

friend_and_foe 4y ago

I like sourcehut, I'm just not a fan of email oriented collaboration workflow, so I dont use it. And the rest of the world isn't either, if the success of github is anything to go by. I get that Drew likes it, the greybeards are used to it, it works, it's adequate, and it keeps things simple, but I just never could do it. I don't like git either tbh, I grumble while I use it. IMO the perfect collaboration suite would be something like fossil with RSS feeds for every action.

toastal 4y ago
I believe the goal is to build a minimal UI for those that don't prefer which is fine, but email & pull requests aren't the only model here. Look how much tooling is created to try to fit stack-based diffs atop Git+GitHub instead of using a different platform.

bsder 4y ago

> Every time a project uses it, its a pain to deal with. Sorry, but I consider that a plus. One of the primary problems with GitHub right now is the "drive by" nature. Everybody is on Github because a bunch of idiotic big corporations made "community contribution" part of their annual review processes so we now have a bunch of people who shouldn't be on GitHub throwing things around on there. Putting just a touch of friction into the comment/contribute cycle is a good thing. The people who contribute then have to want to contribute.

lofaszvanitt 4y ago

This whole open source thing is the biggest farce on planet Earth. Someone with a good knowledge about geeks and their behaviour concocted up this open source bullshit. So now talented people give their skill to the "whole" and they have to beg for contributions and donations to get by. And other geeks (not suits with ties) finance the ones they sympathise with. It's ridiculous. And faceless entities use their hard work for who knows what, but mostly to fatten up their already oversized corp and give back NOTHING. And people, seemingly without common sense suck up to companies that rob them, and even disseminate their shiny new "free" tools. This would be a Hugo-Nebula award winner novel if it wouldn't be reality.

azangru 4y ago
This is such a misrepresentation of the open-source landscape. Yes, there are people working on open-source projects who beg for donations; but there also are open-source projects maintained by full-time employees (Eleventy, paid by Netlify; React, paid by Facebook; Angular, paid by Google; Next.js, paid by Vercel; Linux, paid by various companies; etc.). If a person thinks that his efforts will be better compensated elsewhere, he can always start looking for a paid job.
- lofaszvanitt 4y ago
  People should not beg for their work for a start. If you use it, you should pay for it. A small fee, or a fee that is set by the dev.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    I use a lot of open source software and directly pay for approximately none of it. Do you behave differently and pay for it today? What do you use to accomplish (track and manage) that?
    - lofaszvanitt 4y ago
      That's the problem there are no systems in place for it. So if there is no UI for payments on github, people will never stop for a moment to think about what they take for granted.

lelanthran 4y ago

> 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. Not every bit of code, they are respecting proprietary licenses. When MS puts the code for Windows, Office, Azure and everything else in front of ChatGPT, Copilot, whatever other AI learning model they have, then perhaps they have a leg to stand on. Otherwise, they're just being hypocritical to claim that no injury is being done by using code for training, because they are refusing to train on any of their code. Right now it just looks like they are ripping off open source licenses without meeting the terms of the license. https://www.lelanthran.com/chap7/content.html https://www.lelanthran.com/chap7/content.html

Ajedi32 4y ago
AFAIK that has nothing to do with the license, it has to do with whether the code is public. You don't want the AI accidentally revealing proprietary non-public information (e.g. imagine someone had a secret API key in a private repo and copilot leaked it; that'd be a huge incident), so you don't train it on that information, regardless of what it's licensed under. You could make a similar argument for not training on GPL code, but it's a lot easier to programmatically determine whether or not code is public than it is to programmatically determine what it's licensed under, particularly when you're training on massive amounts of unlabeled data. Not to mention it's way easier to delete an accidentally-added snippet of GPL code from a codebase than it is to "unleak" company secrets after they've been publicly revealed.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  > Not to mention it's way easier to delete an accidentally-added snippet of GPL code from a codebase than it is to "unleak" company secrets after they've been publicly revealed. How often do you think anyone will notice that some part of a proprietary codebase is copied substantially from GPL code? I think it's going to be very rare and a lot of this code will fly under the radar. The GPL was always a kind of legal jiu-jitsu, turning copyright against itself and allowing non-commercial entities to protect themselves from uncompensated exploitation. Models like copilot, if they're legal, upend the status quo tremendously. Even though your code isn't (always) used directly, a commercial entity like Microsoft will slurp it up and sell the resulting model back to you for $9.99/mo.

galangalalgol 4y ago

I'm mostly familiar with gitlab, what does github provide for free above and beyond that? I like that I can run my gitlab pipeline on my machines and sync to a free gitlab instance. I like that I don't read about security vulnerabilities in gitlab pipelines nearly as often as github actions. I like gitlab issues as they are fairly minimal.

fariszr 4y ago
GitHub registry, GitHub actions and GitHub Codespaces are unlimited for public repos, in addition to all enterprise features. That's without talking about nice to have features like GitHub Sponsors, the for you tab, the (arguably) more popular UI layout, It's simply a better platform for Open source projects

muyuu 4y ago

I believe he just wants to do his bit by removing his activity from github towards lowering their dominance numbers in the space. I don't think he intends to stop those LLM code models.

rascul 4y ago

> gitlab doesn't even compare in free features. What features is GitLab missing? I don't know, I'm curious.

fariszr 4y ago
Unlimited package registry, unlimited Action run time, premium features unlocked and more. Also, the free tier on GitHub gives more for private repos too!, unlimited orgs, 2000 Ci minutes etc. It's just plain better, and It's because Microsoft can afford to play the long game, GitLab can't anymore.