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Comment by cyberpunk | Hacker News Reader

I get the sentiment, but people can and should do whatever you permit them to in your license. If you don't want your code hosted in one place, say so in your license.

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From TFA

> Is this a legal document?

> No, it isn’t. If the project is under an open source license, it means that everyone can share a copy – even on GitHub – of the licensed material under certain conditions. A license restricting this right wouldn’t be open source anymore. However, since GitHub may not respect the terms of licensed code that is hosted on their servers, not uploading the code of others there is, in fact, an ethical choice.

emphasis mine. It's a "please be nice", not a "I want to enforce things"

I don’t get this argument. “Here’s a legal document we wrote that says that you’re allowed to redistribute our code. But aside from it we’d like to you to not redistribute it on platforms we don’t like for whatever reason. But we won’t spell it out explicitly in the document itself because reasons, instead we’re guilt tripping everyone who does”.

I respect developers right to put any restrictions on the code they share with the world. But I believe it should either be explicit or not restricted at all. Either write the license that says exactly what you want or otherwise don’t shame people into the desired behavior.

Edit: one could even add a more generic statement to the license stating that it’s forbidden to share the code on any platform that would use it to train their AIs per their ToS, so you don’t need to single out GitHub and potentially others in the future.

There's a ton of stuff people do because they were asked, not because they're legally required.

You don't get ethics and morality not bound by law?

Ethics is subjective, the law less so. Most people don’t find GitHub to be unethical so the author will have a hard time convincing people without using the license terms.

Well, that's the exact reason why they wrote this page: to explain to people why they think GitHub is unethical, and maybe convince them. It's the same as calls to boycott various other companies: they haven't necessarily done anything illegal, but if you convince enough people not to use their products/services anymore, you might make an impact...

The author really doesn't have to convince anyone, "please don't do $X" is more than enough to state their wish for you not to do $X.

i think it is quite scary that so many in here would just not honor a simple "please don't do it."

it is a wish. if someone says "please don't wear shoes in my home" i hope you would honor their very simple and understandable personal wish without setting up a contract for it?

i mean, just be a bit more human, please.

I see it more like an artist telling me “please hang this picture in this orientation” but I prefer it differently and don’t see any reason why me hanging it the way I want in my home affects the author. My copy on GitHub doesn’t detract from their copy.

My aunt once told me "Please don't think negatively of religious people."

Stallman would prefer I not use any closed source software to read his blog, including OS, drivers, web browser, etc.

People routinely ignore unreasonable requests. Asking me to not wear shoes in your home is reasonable. Asking me not to give a copy to Joe after telling me I can give a copy to whomever I want is unreasonable.

How is it unreasonable to want you to not host someone's code on one explicit other platform?

We already established no one is forcing you and if you don't respect the author you don't get to be respected for your decision to ignore them and will earn snarky remarks. (and rightfully so, in my opinion)

> Asking me not to give a copy to Joe after telling me I can give a copy to whomever I want is unreasonable.

This is a repetition of your claim, not an argument for it. Counterpoint: It's entirely reasonable to ask you not to give a copy to Joe.

The author might also be using this a stop-gap until a FOSS licences comes out with similar terms, but don't want to make the current license nonfree because that has different complications.

This is neither ethics nor morality, it's just someone's desire. Which is fine, people should have desires towards their society.

A licensor cannot predict the future. When the GPL was written decades ago, nobody predicted that BigTech would start using it on their servers to offer it as "services", and claim that they didn't need to distribute the source code of the customisations they made because they were (technically) not distributing the software itself but only running it on their servers. Anyone who understood the intent and philosophy of the GPL license understood this as a bogus and unethical argument. But it was believed to be legally tenable (1). So the AGPL license was created to counter this move and preserve the original philosophy of the GPL that users of a software should have access to the source code.

(1) Though I don't know if this has been actually tested in court - courts in India have more freedom to broadly interpret social contracts like the GPL, unlike the US courts, and a positive outcome in favour of upholding the license even in such cases could be possible).

> Anyone who understood the intent and philosophy of the GPL license understood this as a bogus and unethical argument.

I disagree here. The idea, intent, philosophy is one (crucial) thing, the resulting practical artefact (here the license) is another. It works exactly as it was designed to work.

People/companies modifying GPL software for their own use (internal or external) without redistributing the software itself (so without requirement to redistribute the code) existed before SAAS grew on, only at the time, the small scale of this made it a bargain that was "interesting" only depending on one's capacity/hubris to maintain an internal fork on their own.

*aaS hugely tipped the scale, and the side effects, but the mechanics are the same.

And yes, that may not have been the original intent, and the AGPL is as valid a license as a reaction to provide a new tool more in line with the original intent, but that doesn't make the use of the existing GPL all within what it actually enables anyone to, invalid or unethical.

(but maybe only in a specific perspective of the framework of the original intent)

When you decide a license, you can't know what currently existing or future platforms will some day start to violate an aspect of the license or of copyright itself. Does it make sense to add a retroactive clause, then?

There is no law that says you have to say “Good morning”, but yet parents teach their children to do.

How is this case different?

It would greatly improve by some text revisions: "my code", "We", on a generic page without clear authorship or object, on a dedicated subdomain, on a hosting domain, without a signature or contact or kind of option for a webring.

It took me some time to get that this is a generic call (to be followed and reused), still with no clear ownership, rather than a specific claim to a specific code/project (or is it?).

Ethically, you'd think Copilot aligns with the ethos Open Source software. It isn't far off that multiple open source Copilot equivalent get as good as the commerical one. And we are all here for it!

I don’t have any ethical dilemma by posting some open source code on the site I prefer.

>> Is this a legal document?

>> No, it isn’t.

My limited understanding of international copyright law is that copyright disclaimers/licenses per Berne Convention are documents stating the author's wishes no different than this one. When a judge is going to be shown this page where the author states his explicit wish to not have his code uploaded code on Github, in direct conflict with his wishes stated in the LICENSE.txt file, I don't see how it will hold up in court as free software code.

> If you don't want your code hosted in one place, say so in your license.

Also don't forget to go back in time to let your former self know which hosting providers will violate your license.

There's an argument to be made that a neural net learning from your proprietary "source available" code isn't violating copyright. It's not an opinion I would trust the judge to take over necessarily (they might, or not) and hinge my business on, but it's an opinion one can have, so I don't know that github violated any licenses here as afaik there weren't any at the time which specifically stated that <insert definition which can tell what-we-call-AI training and human training apart> is not permitted. At least not until you successfully sue them for it in some jurisdiction.

There have been quite a few cases of the neural nets spitting out the code they've been trained on verbatim, including comments IIRC. They're not just "learning" (if they're "learning" at all).

Well, it's a bit of a unique situation in that they don't directly care about the code being on github, but the secondary effect that it being on github has - microsoft violating the code license terms (which are in the license)

I would question why the "AI" community is being left to their own anarchist devices when they are clearly the core of the problem, instead arguing about licensing pedantics and semantics.

I mean, MS is getting sued over Copilot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33485544

nice.

It was always pretty easy to violate the GPL and get away with it. Repercussions only happen if you successfully get sued.

I don't think you got the sentiment.

It's pretty clear in the article, I hesitate just just cut and paste it here, but the idea is that Github is not respecting some terms of some licenses, so if you upload another authors code to github, you are exposing the author rights to github's depradations.

people can and should do whatever you permit them to in your license

Github has been consistently arguing that they're not bound by the distribution license when training their Copilot model, so I'm not sure what difference that would make.

> I get the sentiment, but people can and should do whatever you permit them to in your license. If you don't want your code hosted in one place, say so in your license.

I mean even doing that will not protect anybody's code, Microsoft doesn't care, they might also be scanning gitlab or bitbucket and doing model training on these. The only way to protect your code at that point is to stay closed source. It's as simple as that.

It's no different from all these models trained on content without permission, whether it be articles or photos,... until all these corporations are sued or copyright laws change to adapt ML, they'll train their model on content regardless of the its license since they are getting away with it.

Restaurant owners also didn't care about renumerating composers of the melodies they were playing. Then copyright laws happened.

> people can and should do whatever you permit them to in your license

I agree with 'can', but I find 'should' a weird choice of words here.

I don't think we are better off by phrasing hyper-specific licenses (or laws).

I think this is more likely to actually work. People don't read licenses and there is no CI that automatically enforces them. They might notice this badge though.

On the other hand, it requires only one determined person out of hundreds of thousands who, for whatever reason (trolling, principled open source maximalist, AI researcher, code archiver, etc), decides to mirror all code marked with this badge to GitHub.

Everywhere I've worked in the last few years has license checking as part of CI pipelines. Our builds fail if GPL'd code is detected in some .jar or whatever. (fossology and x-ray both provide this)

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