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Comment by orliesaurus | Hacker News Reader

If person's legacy is a list of all the good things (or bad things) they've done during their time, Nat's legacy as the CEO of GitHub can also be summed into a list. Let me get started...I only remember this one thing but other users of HN can help add more I supposed:

- That one time when Nat spoke against DMCA law and said taking down youtube-dl was wrong and he actively pushed for their reinstatement. [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1328365679473426432?l...

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He integrated Github with Microsoft and didn't screw it up. That is quite an accomplishment honestly.

There's plenty of time for this to happen...

well, not anymore, as he's no longer the CEO. Unless you count that as screwing up (which it might well be)

He is CEO through November 14th.

So you are saying there's still a chance?

I think Microsoft was well aware that they had to run GitHub differently. And then they found the right manager idling around.

Maybe. Another case is LinkedIn.

How is GitHub integrated actually? Honest question. I use GitHub almost daily and I almost forgot MS acquired GitHub.

It is treated as a separate subsidiary - you have to actually turn in your badge at Microsoft and get a GitHub badge if you go work there.

That youtube-dl moment was a really defining moment for me, particularly as a heavy user of youtube-dl and having contributed a PR here or there.

GitHub handled the situation really well, both in terms of the course of action it took, as well as setting up new procedures and a legal fund to prevent future incidents like this. Along with the EFF, they have actively promoted the right of developers (and FOSS) to tinker.

I think people don't realise how impactful youtube-dl going the wrong way could be.

That was just for show because it was a brand risk. Similar repos without journalists covering them are still banned without dispute.

https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/11/2020-11-0...

If you read the response letter the EFF prepared you'll see their argument was that the "rolling cipher" yt-dl worked around was not an actual protection measure. They contrast it with widevine, which is. There's a good legal argument yt-dl was legal in the us, and there isn't for the repo you linked to. I think standing up for things that have a plausible argument that they're legal in the US but not things that aren't is a reasonable line for a corporation to draw.

Made Github available again in Iran [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1346517148357648385

Let's not give -too- much credit here. This only happened after massive public outcry and targeting trolling campaigns exploiting Github design flaws forced them to take a position, and a position of anything other than defense of youtubedl was going to be an expensive reputation hit given all the journalists covering it.

Meanwhile similar repos get DMCA banned daily, like when Google demanded they remove all repos using a public widevine decryption key: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/11/2020-11-0...

Microsoft is a member of the RIAA so don't expect to see real defense of any repos unless there is major bad press.

Copilot is still fresh in my mind as a reason to question using GitHub to host my source code. Though I understand that my opinion on this is not universal.

unlimited private repos for free if this is a concern?

I don't entirely trust that they will remain excluded from Copilot in future. This probably isn't the place to re-litigate this discussion, but GitHub's claim is that source licenses simply do not apply to what Copilot ingests.

That being the case, the only thing that distinguishes private repos in this context is a thin policy that can be changed at a whim (and perhaps without any announcement).

Also, one of the reasons I put my code on a host like GitHub is so that I can share it/show it off*. So using a private repo to avoid Copliot defeats some of the purpose of me using GitHub in the first place.

*To the extent anyone else cares, at least ;)

Migrating is a valid option

I think it's _exceptionally_ unlikely they would use copilot in private repos. Not for licensing issues, but for security issues. People include secrets all the time in private repos. Trying to get an AI that can train on that sort of data, but avoid including these secrets would be a technical nightmare, and they'd get sued as soon a secret inevitably leaked out. And they have no incentive to; there's _plenty_ of data available in public GitHub to make copilot amazing. And they have access to that data in a way no other company does, so competition is going to be waaaays away.

Outside of that, I see copilot like the future of search engines. Instead of searching for plain text matches, it lets you search for abstract and complicated patterns. The killer feature for me would be seeing for a given suggestion (or search result), where the suggestion was derived from, linking back to the code snippet in GitHub.

This happened after the fact that EFF and the whole community got involved. See his dismissive attitude to this HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24995179

Github acquiring[0] and integrating with NPM.

[0] https://github.blog/2020-03-16-npm-is-joining-github/

And dependabot

I also rememebr how he refused to drop ICE, and tried to treat violations of humans rights as if they were carbon offsets.

Nat has done a great job of embracing the ideals that many if us respect. I look forward to watching Thomas continue to extend Githubs influence in open source and productivity.

I contacted Thomas several years ago about an Open Source project that he didn't maintain anymore and which I wanted to maintain. He was very cool about it and put maintainership in my hands. I wish him the best of luck, too.

ICE contract?

IIRC that existed before Nat. I could be wrong.

Nat posted publicly on this topic back in 2019 [0].

[0] https://github.blog/2019-10-09-github-and-us-government-deve...

Sure, but ICE is still a customer

Correct. I'm not saying he "fixed" the problem, but that he made his and the companies positions more clear.

Could you explain the moral and legal reasoning that necessitates that Github block ICE from using their public services, but also allows them to continue their "Developers should be allowed to user our service" that allows them to defend youtube-dl and usage in Iran?

I'm sure this is going to get hate but not all of ICE is bad. They're also the guys who go after the super rich crimes. The immigration stuff had such a bad effect on the agency that the money crime people literally asked to be separated so they could get back to hunting money crimes without the stigma of the immigration stuff. [0]

Also, immigration control in itself isn't a bad thing. You shouldn't be asking that people stop providing services to a goverment agency. You should demand the goverment agency stops being a bunch of dicks.

[0] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/6/29/17517870/i...

Unfortunately youtube-dl seems to have stopped being worked on since then. Luckily there is a fork though.

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

Great post!

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