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Some people don’t put their code on GitHub, since they object to GitHub’s ToS, especially those pertaining to analysis and use by Copilot and various other uses
by teddyh 3y ago
Some people don’t put their code on GitHub, since they object to GitHub’s ToS, especially those pertaining to analysis and use by Copilot and various other uses which Microsoft may see fit to put the code.
Will Microsoft see this as a free license to use all of PyPI?
- orf 3y agoThey are within their rights to make that choice, but when you publish a package to PyPI you agree to their terms which gives anyone the right to mirror, distribute and otherwise use the code you’ve published.
- kzrdude 3y agoThe rights you find in the PyPI terms, do they provide everything you need to comply with the Github terms? Ultimately it's tricky to understand what Github really means with their terms (they say User-generated contents a lot.)
- uxp8u61q 3y agoThe terms of PyPI give anyone the right to mirror. Do they give anyone the right to mirror on github, is the question.
- pjc50 3y agoClearly yes. It doesn't say any restrictions. Code which has a "can't be placed on github" license restriction is definitely not open source, regardless of what other terms the license purports to have.
- xigoi 3y agoGitHub does more to the code than just mirror it, so having the right to mirror is not enough. If trying to prevent your software from being used to create proprietary software makes it not open-source, is the ONU GPL not an open-source license?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- chatmasta 3y agoThe CoPilot team could pull the code from PyPi and use it to train their models, regardless of whether it's on GitHub. If you don't want AI trained on your code, then either don't publish it, or publish it somewhere that forbids (and preferably enforces) AI companies to index or train on it. But good luck with that... it's public code. Don't publish it if you don't want humans or machines to read it.
- teddyh 3y agoIf Microsoft could legally do that, then why is that clause present in the GitHub ToS?
- chatmasta 3y agoBecause you're pushing the code to GitHub, so they need to enumerate their rights in terms of what they can do with it once you push it there. But if you publish your code to PyPi, the relevant ToS is the PyPi ToS, which has no such clause forbidding either PyPi or others from using the code how they'd like to (and as mentioned by other comments in this thread, the ToS actually explicitly grants others the right to republish the code).
- schemescape 3y agoOut of my own curiosity, which clause in the GitHub TOS are you referring to?
- teddyh 3y agoI don’t know, but it seems to be this one: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37425482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37425482>
- theaiquestion 3y agoBecause most company's/people are (AFAIK) under the impression that training on public data will fall under "Fair Use" because it's substantially transformative, in the case that it isn't then you've already agreed to it on github. It's a fallback clause, "fair use" is irrelevant if you've already given github permission to use it. By adding that clause you can no longer argue that it's not fair use to use the code you put on github after agreeing to their terms.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> Some people don’t put their code on GitHub, since they object to GitHub’s ToS, especially those pertaining to analysis and use by Copilot Copilot was trained on Github code under a “training models doesn’t require permission” theory before there was anything about it in the ToS, and basically every other large model has taken a similar approach to publicly-accessible data of all kinds. > Will Microsoft see this as a free license to use all of PyPI Microsoft doesn’t think they need a license for model training.