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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.
That wont happen because Microsoft has a lot more money to pay lawyers (and lobbyists).
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”.
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?
But wouldn’t that no longer make your code FOSS?
@guojing
That depends on the new clause you add. Of course, it would not be permissive, though.
@iortega
I guess it would just require license terms to be followed when the licensed code is used for a data model, similar to how the AGPL-3.0 does the same with interaction over a network
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)
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