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.
  • toneverends
    23·
    2 years ago

    I can’t wait to see court cases where proprietary software developed using copilot is found to be fully AGPLv3 due to where the ML learnt its patterns.

    • guojing
      17·
      2 years ago

      That wont happen because Microsoft has a lot more money to pay lawyers (and lobbyists).

      • iortega@lemmy.eus
        11·
        2 years ago

        We need to start adding a new explicit clause to licenses.

        Edit: Although when uploading code to github, because of its terms of use, microsoft might be able to void any clause related to ML model training, with something like “when you upload code to GitHub, you accept that it might be used to construct data sets aimed at AI model training”.

        • toneverends
          5·
          2 years ago

          Really though, what is the difference between a copyright-infringing piece of code generated by copilot, and a copyright-infringing piece of code generated by running the original through rot-13 twice?

          • iortega@lemmy.eus
            3·
            2 years ago

            That depends on the new clause you add. Of course, it would not be permissive, though.

        • octt@feddit.it
          3·
          2 years ago

          This can raise some even more interesting questions, like: what should happen if you upload code that isn’t yours on GitHub, and the authors have never used GitHub?

          You can legally redistribute code released under basically any free license, but the ToS agreement that code uploaded on GitHub can be used to train the AI should be valid only if the account owners upload their own code.

          Can’t wait to use this loophole to legally destroy GitHub, but we need to find hundreds if not thousands of angry FLOSS developers that don’t use GitHub and want to sacrifice themselves for the greater good (you could just upload their code on GitHub yourself without their permission and only then get in touch with them, being it free code, but it’s kind of inappropriate in this circumstance)

    • Ordoviz
      15·
      2 years ago

      Codeberg is based on Gitea, which closely resembles GitHub’s interface. Contributing to projects hosted on Codeberg is just as easy as contributing to GitHub projects.

    • Seirdy
      6·
      2 years ago

      The good: familiar UI, nice community

      The bad: much worse accessibility.

      Conclusion: I’d recommend keeping a Gitea/Codeberg remote but not using it exclusively. Doing so should include more people without excluding people who use assistive technology.

      • Sr Estegosaurio
        1·
        2 years ago

        We need better accessibility on FOSS projects. It has tu suck needing to use a cringe service like GitHub because of accessibility.

    • yxzi
      61·
      2 years ago

      Also, one might look into Sourcehut (sr.ht)

      • bc3114
        71·
        2 years ago

        I saw this the other day but couldn’t really understand how it works:( Using mail list in 2022 seems a bit … unintuitive?

        also I’d love to be educated about equivalents to issues/PRs in sourcehut cuz I’m thinking about shifting away from github too:)

        • nachtigall@feddit.de
          44·
          2 years ago

          Mailing list is actually very accessable IMO. You do not have to sign up for any service (with another account or some hostile captcha) but just drop your changes via e-mail (which everyone on the internet has).

          With that workflow you just do your changes locally and once done you create a patch from the diff and send it afterwards to the mailing list. It is super easy with git send-mail and you should check out git-send-mail.io for infos about the git mail workflow (the site is actually by the devs of sourcehut).

          EDIT: Drew also made a nice video about PR vs mail workflow here.

          • sexy_peach@feddit.de
            32·
            2 years ago

            I have to disagree from personal experience. There has only once in my life been a mailing list that it was useful to have been subscribed to, it was by a friend group. Every other mailing list that I was ever part of was a waste of time.

            • nachtigall@feddit.de
              11·
              2 years ago

              How does that contradict the usefulness of mailing lists in context of software development? It’s not a chat for anything but specifically discussing contributions, thus not any worse than discussion boards below PRs.

    • Sr Estegosaurio
      4·
      2 years ago

      I use it, it’s pretty nice. As someone already said: the interface it’s practically the same.

  • Zerush
    8·
    2 years ago

    GitLab! Hosted by GEOINT Services (U) You are accessing a U.S. Government (USG) Information System

    Nice

      • Zerush
        3·
        2 years ago

        Yes, but it is a difference of having the product on a host, which naturally has to be kept in compliance with the legislation of a country like the product itself, this is not very different in the EU, than hosting it directly on a government server, where simple political and even party interests can change the regulations.

  • SudoDnfDashY
    51·
    2 years ago

    I love Gitlab and put some projects on there, Github pages is just too good for free website hosting.