GitHub repo extensively mirrored by GitCode, platform launched by China's CSDN

Yea, that checks out.

I don't think I've ever had good experience with Chinese companies. It is like 90% of the product is marketing and form, rather than function.

I bought some robotics stuff from a Chinese company. It became a paperweight because the documentation was a google drive folder that was a collection of code and random PDF files from various sources, mixed with some Chinese stuff.

The branding was a 10/10 but everything behind the scenes was 0/10, not even functional.

It has happened to me 3+ times and at this point I just try to avoid Chinese stuff when possible.

OP edit: title was "Every GitHub repo stolen by GitCode, platform launched by China's CSDN". Edited to "mirrored" because technically it's okay to mirror open-source projects.

* note: apparently only repos above a certain number of stars (10?) are mirrored. Title changed to "extensively mirrored"

Many people are talking about how it's mirrored not stolen, and this is permitted since it's open source. Let's put legal perspective and semantics aside - cloning all of GitHub into something called GitCode (which btw straight up stole GitHub's UX) is unethical. No one running these projects is expecting a pure clone to appear en masse onto another competing site.

It's extremely distasteful and should be shamed.

One interesting thing is they seem to have also cloned the number of stars each repo has on GitHub. At least that’s true for a cursory check of a few that I’ve committed to. If you click on the star count you’ll then see two separate counts for GitHub and GitCode stars.

It’s one thing to mirror the repos, but it’s another to initially misrepresent the interactivity the repo is getting, even if they’re clear about it when you dig in.

Also, how do you authenticate so you can keep committing and interact with the repo to manage PRs and issues if it’s yours?

Surely almost all publicly available GitHub repos permit making a clone of them in their license?

I created a GitHub repo. If they cloned that, I can get 1 billion per year from them and their business partners.

Let's see. https://github.com/Good-Luck-CSDN/OSS-License-With-Unlimited...

I would put the topic into the editorializing category.

Cloning github repos is not "stealing"...

I haven't looked into the poster's history, but this definition of "stealing" is the exact opposite side of the coin taken by many user's who support LLM bots scraping all content on the internet.

Every user is an individual, so it's expected to have both sides of the coin expressed, but just reading this in the context of most stuff scolling through HN highlights the cocntrast.

It's stolen. It's a content farm.

It will crawl tech articles from other places, use LLM to copy one, and use gitcode url to replace github url.

Found a tweet: https://x.com/yihong0618/status/1776783712954581173/photo/1

Doesn't appear like any of my public repositories have been "stolen." Not sure if I should take that as a good thing or as an offense, to be honest, lol.

The code is open source, so I wouldn't mind anyway.

Not all: only of few of my repos have been cloned.

But it's open sauce, right? Mine are Apache, so this is fine?

As long as I can log in with "hunter2" as my password, it's definitely all fine. %-P

How is this stolen? Its open source code

They’re attempting to overcome the network effects of github and eventually swallow it.

stolen or mirrored?

My repos didn't make it yet... is that a good thing?

Yay! Free backup copies!

Now China can finally block access to GitHub.