GitHub is horrible. It takes the "de" away from the "decentralized" aspect of Git. Also, don't forget the part of the TOS that says Microsoft has all rights to your code regardless of license.

Can you elaborate on “all rights” part? Because I can't find it in their TOS.

“You retain ownership of and responsibility for Your Content”

“This license does not grant GitHub the right to sell Your Content. It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use Your Content outside of our provision of the Service, except that as part of the right to archive Your Content”

“The licenses you grant to us will end when you remove Your Content from our servers, unless other Users have forked it.”

It's not like you upload your code “aaaaand it's gone”, and you immediately lose the rights to publish it elsewhere, like in music industry.

How sad does your life have to be, to spew blatant misinformation about Github of all things?

@kiki Ah, turns out I was wrong. I had heard it from a friend and I haven't actually read the TOS. Sorry. However, as far as I know, GitHub does have the right to use portions of your code regardless of license as long as the repository is public as evidenced by CoPilot. Thank you for your comment, I will remove that part from my rant.

Argh, missed the 5 minute edit time. didn't know that was a thing, I'm new to this website. sorry :-( I might just delete this post since it's wrong.

@emily don't. Your comment is more than enough. Thank you for your courage to admit your mistakes. 🥰

@emily about copilot, everything AI is very shaky. Free Software licences require dependents to also be Free Software. But does training AI on free software code means this AI now uses free software code directly and has to be free software as well? If I saw free software code, memorized something and then used what I learned in my proprietary project, do I violate the licence?

Those are shaky philosophical questions. The only concrete rule is the usage of free software code as a direct dependency or copying and pasting code as-is. That said, copilot doesn't use free software code and doesn't violate licences.

A strong feaure of git is decentralisation, but that is more than offset by its garbage UI - that's why Github made it.

Just a quick reminder that Sourcehut exists, on the topic of decentralization and how GitHub unfortunately destroyed that aspect of Git: https://sourcehut.org/

@kiki I’ve been messing around with a locally running stable diffusion image generator and there are some interesting issues around that too.

Is a neural net, so well trained in a given artist’s images that it can draw an instantly recognisable new image in their style, actually infringing anything? We can’t reproduce the images it was trained on from its internal state (indeed, we can’t even really make sense of its internal state after enough training) so it doesn’t necessarily store anything copyrighted, any more than you do if you look at a picture and remember it - but it’s internal state IS derived from the work of others whom it may supersede. Artists may find themselves out of paid work because of neural nets trained on their work without their consent. People have already won art competitions with AI entries.

Interesting times ahead…

@MM83 plagiarism is never infringement

@kiki is it even plagiarism is, I guess, the issue. That’s not something non-people are traditionally capable or accused of.

jup. "cloud" is the opposite of "decentralised".

if it's not self-hostable, it's garbage and should be hated.

Git is awesome, I wish I had started using it sooner

I'm an avowed Git hater, just to level-set, but how is GitHub taking away the "de" in decentralization?

When you clone a repo from GitHub, you now have a local copy of it. When you commit, it goes into your local copy only. This is de-centralized. It's not until you push to the remote on GitHub that you're now back in a "centralized" environment - and nothing says you ever HAVE to push to the remote, that's kind of the point.

Yes, of course, if you're working with a team then pushing to the remote is certainly going to happen, but that has nothing to do with GitHub or even Git, it has to do with, like, how space and time work? You could just swap thumb drives amongst yourselves and do a lot of merging and never use a centralized remote if you wanted to, but that wouldn't make much sense, right?

Like I said, if you want someone to talk shit on Git generally all day long, then I'm your man! But GitHub doesn't really make it any less de-centralized than Git fundamentally is.

@emily

Thumbs up for admitting being wrong.

Though you are partially right.

The default legalese in ANY service (yes. any service) which has a working law department includes the important statement that the service can be taken offline temporarily or permanently without further notice.

https://docs.github.com/en/...

Another important and common legalese is that termination of contract can happen without further notice:

https://docs.github.com/en/...

So your statement is partially true.

GitHub will host your GitRepository, so you and others can work on it.

But they can pull the plug at any time without further notice - meaning you can loose the host and / or access to it at any time.

It's important to realize that this applies to really all services in the cloud.

If you don't have backups - start doing them.

... and don't store the backups on the same platform (e.g. storing AWS backup on AWS is a very very dumb idea).

I wish we could get more legal counseling, many devs forget these important distinctions and nitbits in legalese...

I hope GitHub never pulls the plug - but don't rely on it being available nor take it for granted. Bad idea.

@emily welcome to devrant! Don't beat yourself up about the hearsay. Your willingness to admit mistake already made me like you as a person.

Have fun in here! RTFToS next time!

@fzammetti what do you use instead of Git? just curious

@kiki Well, I use Git at work. Not by choice, and I don't enjoy it, but I do use it. For my personal projects though, I still use SVN (not counting my stuff on GitHub, of course, but that serves as like 99% a read-only archive, I don't do active development there). Since I have no need for a distributed model, there's no benefit to Git and, frankly, lots of downside.

Interestingly, I DID set up GtiLab on my home server specifically for CI/CD, since it's pretty good for that... but you know what the first step of my pipeline is? Pull code from SVN :)

If we had a free gitea with all the GitHub features and the community it would be great, but you know … the reality is different from what we dream …