Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Tuesday July 05 2022, @12:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the Guck-FitHub dept.

From Software Freedom Conservancy

Those who forget history often inadvertently repeat it. Some of us recall that twenty-one years ago, the most popular code hosting site, a fully Free and Open Source (FOSS) site called SourceForge, proprietarized all their code — never to make it FOSS again. Major FOSS projects slowly left SourceForge since it was now, itself, a proprietary system, and antithetical to FOSS. FOSS communities learned that it was a mistake to allow a for-profit, proprietary software company to become the dominant FOSS collaborative development site.

SourceForge slowly collapsed after the DotCom crash, and today, SourceForge is more advertising link-bait than it is code hosting. We learned a valuable lesson that was a bit too easy to forget — especially when corporate involvement manipulates FOSS communities to its own ends. We now must learn the SourceForge lesson again with Microsoft's GitHub.

GitHub has, in the last ten years, risen to dominate FOSS development. They did this by building a user interface and adding social interaction features to the existing Git technology. (For its part, Git was designed specifically to make software development distributed without a centralized site.) In the central irony, GitHub succeeded where SourceForge failed: they have convinced us to promote and even aid in the creation of a proprietary system that exploits FOSS. GitHub profits from those proprietary products (sometimes from customers who use it for problematic activities).

Specifically, GitHub profits primarily from those who wish to use GitHub tools for in-house proprietary software development. Yet, GitHub comes out again and again seeming like a good actor — because they point to their largess in providing services to so many FOSS endeavors. But we've learned from the many gratis offerings in Big Tech: if you aren't the customer, you're the product. The FOSS development methodology is GitHub's product, which they've proprietarized and repackaged with our active (if often unwitting) help.

Microsoft Did It Again, SFC Urges Developers to Quit GitHub

Microsoft Did It Again, SFC Urges Developers to Quit GitHub:

Microsoft's new service for automatically writing AI-based code, Copilot, has sparked outrage in the Open Source community.

"Microsoft loves open source." So much has been put on this slogan recently, only to change the Open Source community's perspective toward the Redmond company.

And while Microsoft was no longer demonized as the worst thing that could happen to the Open Source, certain of the Redmond tech giant's tactics remained regardless of the times.

[...] And now we get to the core of the issue. Copilot is powered by natural language text and openly available source code, including code in GitHub public repositories. And, of course, you must have a paid subscription or a special invitation from Microsoft to access Copilot.

To put it another way. You are a developer who has contributed valuable content to various GitHub projects over the years. Of course, everyone is welcome to use it.

Would you be satisfied if your code was used for profit by a closed-source app without giving you credit? In its classic fashion, this is where Microsoft tramples on moral boundaries.


Original Submission

 
This discussion was created by janrinok (52) for logged-in users only, but now has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 4, Disagree) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Tuesday July 05 2022, @12:27PM (4 children)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane (4757) on Tuesday July 05 2022, @12:27PM (#1258233)

    I host my open-source projects on Github. It's free, it's plenty good enough for the price, and most importantly, I'm not locked in in any way.

    The minute Microsoft's newfound love for all things open-source proves to have been a load of BS all along and they start making difficulties on Github, I'll move my projects elsewhere. As I did when I moved them away fron Sourceforge.

    Github has nothing that would prevent me from abandoning their platform immediately and with next-to-zero extra work. Zilch. And that's exactly why I use them.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +2  
       Insightful=1, Informative=1, Disagree=1, Total=3
    Extra 'Disagree' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   4  
  • (Score: 2) by bart9h on Tuesday July 05 2022, @04:52PM (3 children)

    by bart9h (767) on Tuesday July 05 2022, @04:52PM (#1258300)

    The beauty of git is that the source repository is completely impossible to be locked in anywhere, as each working copy is the complete repository.

    But github also has issues tracking, wiki, and some other facilities that could be a little more cumbersome to move elsewhere.

    I also has some projects mirrored there, but I don't use it for anything but git itself.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Tuesday July 05 2022, @05:11PM (2 children)

      by Rosco P. Coltrane (4757) on Tuesday July 05 2022, @05:11PM (#1258305)

      Exactly. I only use the repos. I even use it as a free storage space to serve Debian and RPM packages out of it :)

      The whole social media garbage and improved tools they built on top of it, I don't use. That's the lock in. Yeah the tools nice, but the price is reliance on Microsoft. That's too high a price for me.

      • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 05 2022, @07:26PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 05 2022, @07:26PM (#1258339)

        Does the Copilot thing bother you?

        • (Score: 5, Interesting) by ElizabethGreene on Wednesday July 06 2022, @01:06AM

          by ElizabethGreene (6748) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 06 2022, @01:06AM (#1258428) Journal

          Does the Copilot thing bother you?

          I have an opinion on this, but first a bias disclosure. I work for Microsoft in a realm so far removed from GitHub that we barely share a planet.

          I don't have a problem with Copilot. Ignore that it's an AI and the situation gets much less sticky. YourCo gets a new intern. It's Bob. Bob is a novice coder, so you have Bob go read the source of a bunch of open source projects and teach themselves how to code from it. Along the way, Bob learns a specific thing from the source of your project, e.g. a tidy way to do inline getters and setters for an object. Then, lucky you, you get assigned to pair program with Bob. They are sitting next to you when you go to make a new object and they say "Hey, I've got a neat pattern for how to do that" and write new code using the pattern. It's not a copy/paste, it's new code. Would that be bad?

          That's what copilot does. It's writing new code based on patterns it learns from other source.

          You can argue that there is a difference between code written by a human and an AI, but IMHO that's a distinction without a difference. We've long past the point where GPT-3 can write unique works indistinguishable from a human author. We blew past that years ago.

          Some point in the future we'll have to work through the problem of an AI's rights for the code, text, or music they write, but we're not ready to have that conversation yet. For now, I welcome the help.