I would love to see a lawsuit which requires GitHub to provide their full Copilot dataset.
That's not unfair, and not the basis for a lawsuit, it's just business.
> Copilot is not only making money off of open-source, they are making money off of open-source in a way others can't.
Of course! That's why MS paid squillions to buy Github.
most monopolies are completely legal. small town with only one gas station or one grocery store? 100% monopoly, 100% legal.
there are plenty of alternatives to github, paid, free, as a service, and self-hosted. GitHub has a large market share, but no monopoly.
This isn't a company with plenty of goodwill in its sails launching a hip new product. They're not Do No Evil era Google or Apple riding high on the iPod. We can't just pretend there isn't a history.
I posit that they have indeed learned from their mistakes.
1) They train Copilot with repos hosted on github.com. 2) Users who upload code to github.com grant GitHub an explicit license[0] granting GitHub the right to show that code to others. 3) GitHub do not specify which technologies or techniques they may use to show this code to others, meaning they may use any technique they like.
Microsoft have learned. And they have covered their collective asses. Users who host code on github.com agreed to these terms.
Users who don't like their code showing up in Copilot should not be hosting their code on GitHub, because they agreed to have their code delivered to others when they signed up.
[0]: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...
> This license does not grant GitHub the right to sell Your Content. It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use Your Content outside of our provision of the Service[...]
I imagine the crux of this case will be what constitutes "the Service", and whether that includes Copilot. Also whether licensing Copilot counts as selling Your Content.
Which is to say: Microsoft was taking specific action which wasn't a natural consequence of their software, but was being actively enforced to keep out competition. Vendors didn't organically discover consumers weren't interested in getting a PC without Windows and IE, they were prevented from even offering the option lest they be completely denied the ability to offer that at all.
they are not threatening to block access to github.com for all Comcast users if Comcast chooses not to block access to gitlab.com, for example. That would be an illegal activity for a monopoly. simply existing as a monopoly is not itself illegal.
Citation needed. I'm interested to know of examples of how they have stifled competitors. AFAIK Gitlab came of age well after Github had already grown super-large. If Github could have killed Gitlab, wouldn't they have done so?
"GitHub has around 56 million users, whereas GitLab has over 31 million users." - https://radixweb.com/blog/github-vs-gitlab
That is also excluding Azure, Bitbucket, AWS and the plethora of other git repository hosting companies and services. AFAIK, gitlab has more payed (AKA, private or premium) customers than does Github (though I lack a citation there, but that was my understanding when researching this a couple years ago on where to host a private companies code. My take-away then was that Gitlab is actually more popular amongst private companies and Github is more popular for open source projects).
What would be considered Monopoly marketshare? I would suggest that Facebook, Twitter and Amazon have monopolies. If you get shut down as an Amazon seller, that can be 90% of your revenue. Given so many people can leave, and have left Github voluntarily, is implicit evidence that there are very decent alternatives (if not, there would be no alternative and you would be forced to stay with Github for lack of alternatives. That is not the case though, it's easy to just go over to Gitlab. From my perspective, I have no idea how Github can kill Gitlab, I'm curious if there is a vector where Github could use it's network effects to diminish Gitlab, as a specific example. So, how could Github do that?)
Does the law really say you can't include a free web browser if someone else created a paid one?
I don't want to live in a world where potential improvements for consumers get companies sued for antitrust.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
Yes. It's called the Sherman Act, and it's the basis of anti-trust enforcement in the US.
https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
<<<The Sherman Act outlaws "every contract, combination, or conspiracy in restraint of trade," and any "monopolization, attempted monopolization, or conspiracy or combination to monopolize." >>>
I know lots of people here don't like it, but it is the law and that was the question; "this" in parent clearly meant "use dominance in one market to gain dominance in another" in grandparent, regardless of whether that's actually the central issue here or not.
For instance, Apple already knew about the portable hardware market and extended their reach into the portable music market via iPod. It used the iPod to reach the music marketplace via iTunes. Used its market dominance to create iPhone and the rest is history.
Maybe that's a personal maxim on your part but there's no law that says if you have dominance (what does that even mean?) in one market you cannot enter another. Think about what you're saying. We'd have no multi-product company if that were the case. What does "dominance" or "market" mean anyway?
As you point out, establishing what dominance is in a market is a tricky thing and it is why governments will investigate any potential signs of it. Now, personally I don't think this is really an issue for Github, or microsoft (the parent company) but let's not pretend market dominance and abuse of dominant position are not a real things.
TLDR: If you have a monopoly in a market, you can't use your position to get a heads up in another distinct market by bundling products together. Ex: Microsoft can't use their monopoly position in the OS market to get an advantage in browsers by bundling IE with Windows.
It's my understanding that this doesn't apply if you don't have a monopoly, and it also doesn't apply unless you're actually bundling the sale of multiple things together.
Doesn't seem to be relevant here IMO.
>or instance, Apple already knew about the portable hardware market and extended their reach into the portable music market via iPod. It used the iPod to reach the music marketplace via iTunes. Used its market dominance to create iPhone and the rest is history.
Look at what you're saying here. Apple had domain experience in hardware and launched a new product (good). Then it used the dominance of that product to muscle into an entirely different market (bad). And the combination of hardware and market has led to Apple being able to extract their tax on half the music market, or whatever they have.
This is exactly what we don't want and why anti-trust laws exist.
Just because there is some existing competition which has a few percent marketshare and technically it's not a monopoly doesn't materially change anything besides a pro forma excuse. Which is why Google have been propping up Mozilla, they want the excuse "but technically there's another browser". However for consumers and the market it doesn't matter that technically there's an option that practically nobody uses.
>The Google BigQuery Public Datasets program now offers a full snapshot of the content of more than 2.8 million open source GitHub repositories in BigQuery. Thanks to our new collaboration with GitHub, you'll have access to analyze the source code of almost 2 billion files with a simple (or complex) SQL query.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/public-datasets/github-...
I'm pointing out that this limitation is not meaningful because everyone can access all GitHub hosted source code through BigQuery, where they won't be rate limited.
I'm not comparing BigQuery to Copilot.
I pay GitHub / Microsoft to host my code, and that's all I expect them to do with it, host it, as securely as possible. It sounds like Microsoft are doing more than this so what's your actual deal...if you have one?
GitHub considers the contents of private repositories to be confidential to you. GitHub will protect the contents of private repositories from unauthorized use, access, or disclosure in the same manner that we would use to protect our own confidential information of a similar nature and in no event with less than a reasonable degree of care.
"You have bested me in this epic battle of the minds."
Yeah, Microsoft has bamboozled users for years... that's the whole point.
If we define "open source" as "you can't necessarily use this to train an AI", then Copilot itself is illegal because it's using code without permission.
If we define "open source" as "you can use this to train an AI", then Copilot it legal, but GitHub may be illegally misrepresenting itself as a host for "open source", as the policy it hosts code under isn't truly open-source.
If we define "open source" as "you can't necessarily use this to train an AI" but then GitHub's policy explicitly states "by using us as a hosting provider, you give us permission to use your code to train AI" then they are in the clear. But I doubt they have that clause or at least had it when Copilot was first revealed.
But of course if the data is already sitting in object storage inside your cloud environment and all you have to do is run some MapReduce jobs to get at it...
Hence: unfair, anticompetitive, intellectual-property-right-abusing behavior. Microsoft GitHub (tm) can prevent anyone else from running the kinds of analysis they do by simple "operational security", while running literally any kind of analysis, model training, etc. they want. Don't like it? But their commercial services and products so you can run Microsoft GitHub (tm) on your very own Microsoft Azure (tm) infrastructure, using Microsoft Visual Studio Code (tm) and Microsoft GitHub Codespaces (tm) so work on _your_ code privately.
Best of all, you can still still take advantage of the huge library of "free" code offered by Microsoft GitHub Copilot (tm) to ensure your private, proprietary codebase still has all of the advantages of Open Source Software, brought to you exclusively by the Microsoft GitHub Platform (tm).
ArchiveTeam has a distributed Github archive project[0]. It's unclear what the status is right now. It seems like a worthwhile idea.
[0] https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/GitHub#Archive_Team_p...
I’ve also built many parallel repo downloaders for CI reasons. You can clone repos all day pretty much with little rate limiting. I haven’t pushed parallelism past 64 per host though
Their freemium product is useful to many open-source projects and communities, but you do not have any more rights to use Microsoft's GitHub than you have to Microsoft's Windows.
Is it? Data storage would be prohibitive, but I can see ways to download the entirety of Github in a few weeks/months (assuming my size estimate is accurate).
https://www.gharchive.org/ http://ghtorrent.org/
also available on GCP as a dataset, provided by Github itself: https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/github/...