But china bad and scary.
Comment on China is attempting to mirror the entire GitHub over to their own servers, users report
dan@upvote.au 1 week ago
I don’t understand why this is a bad thing? Open source code is designed to be shared/distributed, and an open-source license can’t place any limits on who can use or share the code. Git was designed as a distributed, decentralized model partly for this reason.
They might end up using the code in a way that violates its license, but simply cloning it isn’t a problem.
slacktoid@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
barryamelton@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
The code needs to maintain the copyrights and authors. They are “mirroring” usernames into their own domain, with mails that dont correspond to the original authors, stealing their contributions.
Aceticon@lemmy.world 1 week ago
That would make it plagiarism, which is a whole different matter than merelly copying that which is free to copy.
dan@upvote.au 1 week ago
with mails that dont correspond to the original authors,
Oh! I didn’t realise this. Do you have an example?
HKayn@dormi.zone 1 week ago
I’m seeing this misconception in a lot of places.
Just because something is on GitHub, doesn’t mean it’s open source. It doesn’t automatically grant permission to share either.
Grimm665@lemmy.world 1 week ago
It may not be de jure open source, but if the code is posted publicly on the internet in a way that anyone can download and modify it, it sort of becomes de facto open source (or “source available” if you prefer).
JackbyDev@programming.dev 1 week ago
Please don’t muddy the water with terms like this. Something is open source if and only if it has an open source license.
dan@upvote.au 1 week ago
[deleted]HKayn@dormi.zone 1 week ago
Correct, you are allowed to click the “fork” button and nothing else. You’re still not allowed to download, use, modify, compile or redistribute the code in any way that doesn’t involve the “fork” button.
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I personally don’t care if someone “steals” my code (Here’s my profile if you want to do so: github.com/ZILtoid1991 ), however it can mean some mixture of two things:
- China is getting ready for war, which will mean the US will try its best to block technology, including open source projects.
- China is planning to block GitHub due to it being able to host information the Chinese government might not like.
Of course it could mean totally unrelated stuff too (e.g. just your typical anti-China and/or anti-communist paranoia sells political points).
synapse1278@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Isn’t GitHub already blocked in China?
Miaou@jlai.lu 1 week ago
It is
dan@upvote.au 1 week ago
US will try its best to block technology, including open source projects.
You can’t block open source projects from anyone. That’s the entire point of open source.
irreticent@lemmy.world 1 week ago
You can’t block open source projects from anyone.
I think they were referring to blocking GitHub from public access. In the event of a world war I could easily see Microsoft obeying the order to shut down GitHub.
BlueMagma@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
I expect it’s going likely to be used to train some Chinese AI model. The race to AGI is in progress. IMO: “ideas” (code included) should be freely usable by anyone, including the people I might disagree with. But I understand the fear it induces to think that an authoritarian government will get access to AGI before a democratic one. That said I’m not entirely convinced the US is a democratic government…
PS: I’m french, and my gov is soon to be controlled by fascist pigs if it’s not already, so I’m not judging…
dan@upvote.au 1 week ago
Even if they do that, the license for open source software doesn’t disallow it from being done.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
It certainly can. Most licences require derivative works to be under the same or similar licence, and an AI based on FOSS would likely not respect those terms. It’s the same issue as AI training on music, images, and text, it’s a likely violation of copyright and thus a violation of open source licensing terms.
Training on it is probably fine, but generating code from the model is likely a whole host of licence violations.
dan@upvote.au 1 week ago
Some, but probably not most. This is mostly an issue with “viral” licenses like GPL, which restrict the license of derivative works. Permissive licenses like the MIT license are very common and don’t restrict this.
MIT does say that “all copies or substantial portions of the Software” need to come with the license attached, but code generated by an AI is arguably not a “substantial portion” of the software.