Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same
theregister.com
theregister.com
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2022/jun/30/give-up-github-la...
You need to use a license that restricts its use, and restricts the use of derivatives otherwise someone uploading a fork to Github will just put you back where you started. I think GPL3 would give you such protections, but you should check with a lawyer if this is particularly important to you.
It reminds me of:
However, it does not prove that your version of the repository was the first and original one.
Generally i do recommend to avoid cryptocurrencies for anything serious. Its public image is beyond repair.
The only way you can stop them using your code so is to not share it with anyone. If they find your code (even via a leak!), they can legally use it, if their fair use claim is correct.
(Nitpick: Fair use isn't an exemption from copyright, it's a defense for violating copyright)
My uneducated brain cannot tell the practical difference between them, can you or anyone knowledgeable please explain like I'm 5?
Take UK law, "fair dealing" (I believe it's written as) is specifically stated as "not infringing copyright". Which means it's an allowance or exception, depending on how you want to phrase it. It's not something that is technically in breach and then used as a defence in (for example) court. In fact I don't even know how that kind of law would work in practice.
However since fair use can be a little subjective at times that does mean people are often forced to defend their position that their usage of the source material fell under "fair dealing".
Nitpick: Fair use is both a Constitutional and statutory (the latter codifying the former) limitation on the exclusive rights granted as part of copyright, so it's definitely an exception.
Procedurally, it operates as a defense, but that's not inconsistent with it being an exception.
"Training of ML models with data not licensed to you and then selling the output of the model" isn't on those lists, and consequently is a flagrant copyright violation in - broadly - the entire EU.
If you are a developer in the EU using Copilot, it is really pretty obvious that using Copilot is a commercialized copyright violation, which is e.g. in Germany (but I'm guessing many other states) a criminal offense, not a civil offense. Now, people might say, they're paying Microsoft for this service, and that's not in the EU, so something something can't prosecute. Of course, that doesn't actually work in the real world, and this corner of prosecuting copyright violations has been extremely well explored during the many, many trials of people committing IP violations of music and films over the past few decades.
In addition to that, I'm pretty sure routine copyright violations by an employed developer would be one of the more clear-cut reasons for a termination without notice and compensation for having to replace the affected code.
How is that a contrast? The US has an actual, enumerated list of exceptions (the US term is “limitations on exclusive rights”, of which fair use is, in the US Code order, the first.)
See the section headings in Title 17, Chapter 1: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/chapter-1
In the same way, Google is making use of fair use by providing website titles, summaries, book samples, etc. There has been some controversy with news about them taking that too far. But by and large, they are still legal. And people of course have tried to challenge that in courts. It's just small samples being distributed, not a complete work. There are lots of examples of companies depending on fair use for all sorts of things. E.g. quoting an author or paraphrasing their work is fine. You don't need their permission for that.
Also another point here is that it isn't necessarily just MS that would be violating copyright (if the above somehow wasn't the case) but the receiver of the auto-completed code that ends up distributing that code. Because it is that code that ends up being distributed. All MS does is show you some code sample, it's the programmer that decides what to do with it. Whether you receive your sample from Stackoverflow, co-pilot, or a book is not relevant: you are responsible for the code you distribute.
Finally, the Github terms of use give Github some rights to doing things to your code if you choose to put it on Github. That probably also covers what they are doing with Github Co-pilot. That's a valid reason for removing your code from Github if you don't agree with that but of course no guarantee that Github Co-pilot would not crawl external public git repositories or that whomever you pick as an alternative wouldn't have some similar legalese in their terms of use. If these things matter to you, review it. Just because Gitlab hasn't launched a co-pilot competitor doesn't mean they couldn't.
Or maybe I've misread the article?
I suppose this is how e.g. Red Hat operates.
I didn't envision that my code would be split into tons of little code snippets and then sold around. Doing so, the spirit of the GPL-isation of my software has been betrayed.
There's also a free flow of information argument. Citing pieces of my code is good for that flow. But MSFT doesn't seek free flow here, it seeks a money-making flow. So I disagree.
I understand your explanation and somehow, it sounds right on the pragmatic level. But on the idealistic level, it sounds wrong :-/
Dunno...
On balance, you are distributing software that is copyrighted (nothing you can do about that). The GPL gives users some limited permissions that undo some of the restrictions that come with copyright. Fair use applies to copyrighted material regardless of the license and is not something you can actually restrict with a license. That kind of is the whole point of fair use. So, the GPL, it's (supposed) intentions, and idealism don't factor into the equation here. That's just not how it works.
Sorry to burst your bubble.
It certainly does. That's one big reason why judges often disagree and judges' rulings can often be predicted by which party appointed them.
But the copyleft ideology in particular rarely factors into court cases, because few judges care about it.
I feel like this has not really been tested, especially in a court that resides outside the United States. Microsoft, as far as I know, probably has legal entities in other countries as well. A German developer residing in Germany could take Microsoft Deutschland GmbH to court in Germany.
That clause is doing a lot of work here. You seem to be starting with an assumption that their claim is correct, but it's kind of a ridiculous assumption. Here are the usual categories of fair use, according to the US copyright office.
"criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research"
Which of these do you think describes Copilot? I say none. I also suspect that most people and most courts would say none. I don't think "arbitrary incorporation into other works without attribution" fits even a generous definition of fair use. Some might even recognize it as a definition of plagiarism. Can you make your case instead of assuming it?
As far as practical consequences are concerned: if their fair use claim is struck down, Copilot is dead, unequivocally, because the only kind of license they can satisfy is a public-domain-equivalent one, and there’s not all that much such code. This is why I said “depends entirely on”.
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31849107 where I said much the same thing, and pointed out that any mentions of the GPL specifically are a red herring.
I mean it does in the short term, because Microsoft trains it on public GitHub code.
Beyond that, as long as Microsoft is operating under their “fair use” theory, licensing is irrelevant: if they decide to expand their funnel to public code from outside of GitHub, yours will get sucked in if it is public, regardless of license, since their entire theory is they don't need a license.
They seem to say that's not the only source.
"What data has GitHub Copilot been trained on?
GitHub Copilot is powered by Codex, a generative pretrained AI model created by OpenAI. It has been trained on natural language text and source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub"
The only one that learned very quickly to take advantage of this was Microsoft that is buying the open-source ecosystem and offering the best tools for free. It's not only a clever pricing scam, but a form of EEE; that suffocates the likes of JetBrains which they have to increase prices themselves.
It is not early days anymore and this time GitHub is part of Microsoft and it tells us that it will be around for a long time. The tech bros cheering on GitHub and Microsoft will soon realise that neither of them are their friends and Microsoft is still at its Embrace, Extend and Extinguish ways.
Seems a case of "license respect for me but not for thee".
Microsoft are just a string of companies changing their original promises when taking over smaller companies with proper values.
See : Meta with Oculus not needing a FB account.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/10/meta-removing-faceboo...
GitHub's appeal is all the add-on functionality that's not actually stored in the git repo itself; e.g. Issues, Pull Requests, etc. That can't be migrated away easily.
Anyone who (a) has concerns about GitHub (monoculture, Microsoft, Copilot, whatever), and (b) relies on such add-on functionality, should look into moving that metadata into their repos. To give Microsoft some credit, GitHub Actions already does this (via YAML files in a .github/workflows folder)
For my personal projects, I use a simple program called Artemis to manage issues, which just stores maildir files in a hidden folder: http://www.chriswarbo.net/blog/2017-06-14-artemis.html
Still, we use it, but try to use just core functionality (git, CI, issues, wiki) and avoid anything else. Always wanted to try gitea, maybe now it's the time.
We did some profiling and spent quite a bit of time looking at Gitea's source code, it was pretty clear in the end that it's just very very inefficient for large setups. It does an excessive amount of I/O on the Git repositories every time you load a page; there is some caching but not enough / not of the right things. We were really open to implementing fixes and submitting PRs but the community was so hostile that we just abandoned it.
It was overall an enormous waste of time and I can't recommend Gitea to anyone with a setup larger than a handful of small repositories.
I wonder how CodeBerg works though.
This, 100%.
Git is useful for all your textual versioning needs - but your friends don't really need access to all your git repos.
The whole idea of putting your whole life on GitHub is a dev's equivalent of putting all your life on Facebook - an excellent idea, as far as Microsoft and Facebook are concerned. If you can't sell ads to coders, then perhaps you can sell them recycled code.
But yeah perhaps I'm hatin' :)
Speaking of GH alternatives, though, the Tildeverse has https://tildegit.org/ https://tildegit.org/.
It surprises me though that Microsoft hasn't added a Stack overflow like panel to github. More. People are jumping between GH for the code AZ md StackOverflow for the support.
If you change your license to forbid removing the license, then there's a good chance that it doesn't hold any legal power. Reason being that machine processing is allowed by copyright laws.
But almost all licenses already do that, for example the MIT license says:
> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
It's git-only. FWIW, I chose SourceHut in part because they support git and Mercurial, and I'm a Mercurial user. [1]
FWIW, the main SourceHut developer last year moved to the Netherlands. https://drewdevault.com/2022/03/24/Netherlands-update.html , and commented "I will be re-locating SourceHut, the incorporated entity, to the Netherlands, and gradually moving our infrastructure over the pond."
[1] Also because SourceHut is whole-heartedly pro-free software, and also because I feel better being able to pay for a service than depend on the largess of a large company, and also because I don't like monocultures.
However I doubt I can really say its not politically charged.
Here is an overview of the federation activities: https://forgefriends.org/blog/2022/06/30/2022-06-state-forge...
Just like if they would've copied it from some code base they found online under a non-permissive license.
One of such is https://www.blackducksoftware.com/
Citation, as they say, is needed.
We have some vague ideas of how brains learn. We have some vague ideas of how GPT-3 works. They are not the same vague ideas. Is reality congruent? Nobody knows. There is certainly no existence proof of human- or gorilla- equivalency.
That's a misunderstanding.
In a world without any concept of authorship and copyright, people would share, modify and redistribute books, drawing, musical scores...
But most software can be compiled (and even obfuscated), making it unpractical to further modify and redistribute a copy.
This means than in such word closed source would be still present. And freeload from FOSS without even giving attribution.
FOSS is about building a cooperative development model.
Copyleft is based on copyright laws simply because there's no other legal instrument to ensure that software remains open.
Tell that to people who remove DRM restrictions, fix bugs and then distribute the result. The only reason there aren't companies and university courses dedicated for such modifications is that it's illegal.
Following the idea of "make it as friction-free as possible", something I'd like to be able to do is somehow track my usages of various packages across the course of a month, then divide a set amount of money, say £15, across each of them proportionally. Each project could have whatever amount they "earned" (doesn't seem like the right word, but never mind) automatically donated to them at the end of each month.
A library downloaded 3 times a year might just have users that know how to set up a local cache, while a library used by unskilled teams will be downloaded 15 times every time they run a build.
All your model does is push people to learn how to make local caches, and it also doesn't work at all with FLOSS licenses, since there is a right to redistribute.
They should rename themselves to Technical Progress Level Conservancy or something like that.
If you have a problem with that, learn to pick your licenses properly.
Although if you find your code in a project even without such a clause, you can probably still attempt to sue them for copyright violation, since most likely they are not abiding by your license anyways.
In any case that's not what Copilot does, unless you deliberately make it do that.
After listening for hours about how they basically made a streamlined design system for any company to use freely, QA began. I raised my hand and when called upon I asked whether or not anyone in the room felt that the companies who would be using it actually deserved it.
The lead dev got flustered the room went quiet for a second before they moved on.
Feels like maybe people are beginning to wake up a bit, I hope.