Is Over, Bye GitHub | Hacker News Reader

Is Over, Bye GitHub

github.com

19 pointsroramigator21 comments

I find this entirely ridiculous. Just as a heuristic, the first complaint is about CoPilot. I don't use CoPilot. If that's the #1 complaint the rest is peanuts.

As for Github being proprietary, I don't get the issue. My supermarket is not open source. Should I ban it? To me, they are offering free services to support open source. Services that cost money. It costs money to store the data, to serve the data, to run the servers. It costs money to process github actions, to fight spam. to moderate disputes, etc...

Where is the lock in? Every piece of data related to your projects are available for you to access. Issues, Wikis, etc..

Even github actions, the runner is here and open source

https://github.com/actions/runner

There's no lock in. There's a company offering a free service to open source developers and hoping that you'll pay for anything not open source.

I don't see the issue any more than the fact that my grocery store is not some kind of collective.

> I don't use CoPilot. If that's the #1 complaint the rest is peanuts.

CoPilot launders your code, it doesn't matter whether you use it or not.

Google and Stack Overflow launder your code, too. People can and do search for something that uses ScheduledExecutorService, find some code that uses it on github and copy the incantation used by the code, in much the same way as copilot does.

Bug or feature? Open source is a gift, IMO.

Wrong, SO or github code is not public domain, you must respect copyright and licenses.

Copilot mashes existing licensed code into a ML model, and presents it under its own (shady) new copyright and license - hence, code laundering.

Maybe this would be a better link than your own empty github page https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/

FSFs reasoning:

1. it's proprietary

2. copilot is for-profit

3. GitHub's Contract with ICE

4. their entire hosting site is, itself, proprietary and/or trade-secret software

5. GitHub does not even offer any self-hosting FOSS option.

6. GitHub has long sought to discredit copyleft generally.

7. GitHub is wholly owned by Microsoft, a company whose executives have historically repeatedly attacked copyleft licensing.

---

Thoughts regarding those

1. i'm not a religious zealot. I'm not opposed to people making proprietary software. I'm not opposed to using proprietary software.

2. see my comment on 1. Also, even if you disagree with the license violation bs that it does, not using github won't stop it. If everyone abandon's github, a) GitLab will fill in the gap b) CoPilot or its successor will just start trawling every public git repo it can find instead of just the ones on GitHub. This will happen eventually anyway so any argument against CoPilot is unaffected (long term) by abandoning github.

3. Valid. Honestly, i thought they'd abandoned that.

4. same as 1

5. duh, because 1

6. uh... say what? They couldn't exist without it.

7. And have since changed their tune and fully embraced it.

embrace was always part of their tune

sure, but in the context of opensource embracing makes everyone stronger and hampers their ability to "extinguish" (embrace -> extend -> extinguish).

I'm not saying ms wasn't bad historically, but we need to judge them based on their current (years now) actions within OpenSource and so far, they seem to have really gotten it and been doing the right thing for the community in ways that aren't going to screw us. (setting aside teh very complicated morality of copilot)

If you're going to link to someone else's article and add nothing of your own, maybe just link directly to that.

if you don't want people to use github then why are you linking to your own personal github page rather than the article itself?

Github should be transparent about "getting code to train their AI models", then all is good to me.

There's no "github". It's just a product at microsoft at this point. When you frame it as "should we host all of our code and version control on Microsoft servers" I think this becomes more obvious.

Can we also switch to a platform that has Fossil SCM support? I really like the branching model, where the branch is part of the commit, as well as multiple checkouts, and built in issue tracking.

What is new about this position? I don't have any personal problems with the service but I've not logged a commit in years.

Github Copilot being trained on (presumably) any/all public repositories on Github without any sort of consent seems to be the last straw for at least some people.

Interesting so some kind of mechanism at github is leading programmers that don't know how to write code and just simply lift it? I've taken lines of code from github comments and rewrote them for my own use case. If I find a tricky problem that the answer is eloquently handled in Stack Overflow I sometimes use the code and write in a comment to the share link so I know where it came from and also tells me a little about why it is there.

I think zero trust in code is going to be a big problem.

I have a similar concern with things like Dall-E simply lifing anyone's whole artistic life experience because people are too cheap to actually hire a real artist.

And yet the page at the end of the link is on GitHub. Hmm ...

Microsoft's finest Embrace, Extend Extinguish project.

I didn't see the words "owned by Microsoft" which would be first on my list of reasons for this...

From the article being linked to: >GitHub is wholly owned by Microsoft, a company whose executives have historically repeatedly attacked copyleft licensing.

I must have glossed over it expecting it to be in large, intimidating bold letters.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com