I'm so tired of this argument. I want to host stuff myself. Really, I do. But I really don't have enough time in the day to do it.
I set up a blog this weekend using Hugo, Ansible, and Github Actions to host it on NearlyFreeSpeech.NET. It "only" took two days, but I'm exhausted and I don't actually have any content yet.
I host Plex and TiddlyWiki at home on my Raspberry Pi. I used docker and traefik. Sometimes it still has weird issues and I have to reboot it. It was another project that "only" took a weekend and left me exhausted.
So let's say I don't want to self host, but I don't want to use Github. What are my options? I used to use Bitbucket, but I moved to Github a few years ago to consolidate my accounts. I liked Bitbucket, but people give you weird looks when you give them a Bitbucket URL. It's not as seamlessly supported in apps that can automatically understand Github urls. Confluence kept buying other products and tacking them on. And they kept trying to upsell me.
Then there's Gitlab. I'm going to have to get used to it because my employer is transitioning to it, away from Github. This article mentions developers having short memories. I remember when Gitlab decidedly said they'll do business with anyone back when people were shaming tech companies for helping and cooperating with ICE a few years ago. That left a bad taste in my mouth.
There's Sourcehut. But I have friends with beef with the guy who made it and I don't want to support him.
I can't help but feel like Github is probably the lesser evil here. Honestly, I'd pay for a service if I believed in it. It's important to me that I'm the customer, not the product. That's why I switched from Gmail to ProtonMail a few years ago. I have their top tier paid account because I believe in them and I want to get what I pay for.
Sorry, I don't really have a point. I'm just tired of this argument. I'd self host in a second if I could do it quickly, easily, and reliably. But I don't think I can.
Well it's a tradeoff right? Zero hassle, zero control. Lots of hassle, lots of control.
Part of the complexity is that the effects aren't all immediate, and humans aren't good at thinking long term. People put code on GH for years and then Microsoft took it and undermined those same developers. So it might seem like zero hassle right now, but it's probably big destruction later on.
Personally I'm growing an allergy to these kinds of "no catch, we promise" services. What they usually mean is "we sell your data to other marketers, governments, and potential bad actors", "we try to hypnotize you with ads", "we aren't actually giving you this thing and we'll delist it whenever we want", or worse.
I know this doesn't respond to your issue, my weak effort there is that are a fair number of hosts for things like nextcloud and gitlab. My brother runs a substantial suite of services all through Docker and admins it almost not at all. This stuff is possible, but I agree it's harder than signing into GH with SSO and pushing code. All I'm saying is that there are other costs, you just don't pay until way later.
That's very true. I just wish there was a middle ground. I'd pay for a service that just runs a managed version of Gitea. Something similar to installing WordPress or a PHP bulletin board system to an old-fashioned web host. Hell, I could probably do just that if there was a super low end version of these types of services that will run with just PHP and Apache.
EDIT: Oh my god. I think I understand Sqlite and Fossil a little better now.
> I remember when Gitlab decidedly said they'll do business with anyone back when people were shaming tech companies for helping and cooperating with ICE a few years ago. That left a bad taste in my mouth.
I could see how this would leave a bad taste in your mouth, but I'm not sure it follows that Github is the lesser evil.
I can't think of specific examples (aside from the EEE philosophy brought up in the post and copilot if you consider that to be a Bad Thing), but Microsoft seems to have done plenty of Bad Stuff in the past. Maybe a comparable amount, if not more, Bad Stuff than GitLab?
Self-hosting should become absurdly easy to become widely popular, and to become any popular around non-technical users.
Very easy Linux host setup (like that of AWS, Linode, DO, etc) + containers (podman or docker) or stuff like flatpack or appimage should solve most of that problem. What's missing form the picture is an easy (I mean laughably easy) way to connect services. Something like a patch panel should be created to control UFW / traefik / whatever, when apps don't snap together automatically.
> There's Sourcehut. But I have friends with beef with the guy who made it and I don't want to support him.
What's their beef if you don't mind me asking? Drew seems like a nice enough guy. He is very opinionated obviously, but he's created many amazing FOSS projects.
>But I really don't have enough time in the day to do it.
Things that take time cost money, because time is valuable. You can pay in money to self-host, or you can pay in time, or you can pay in privacy and marketing, but you can't just get it for free.
So far as I am concerned the story with GitHub copilot is "Nothing more to see here, move on folks."
Granted people in business get a sugar rush when they see something that looks like working code generated automatically but at best it is doing the 20% of the work that seems to get you 80% of the way there except taking the bugs out of something written mindlessly is a stupendously expensive process.
I'd like to make a point about what Open Source is to me.
At it's core, open source is not about The Internet at all. Open Source is about being able to look at the source of the software you have. If someone gives me (or god forbid I buy) some software, can I inspect the source? If yes, then it's Open Source.
Putting code on the internet is another thing entirely. Related, sure; but ultimately not at all the same. In fact, there's so much "open source" crap out there that doesn't even compile, build, or run, that isn't Open Source at all! OK, maybe it still is, software is allowed to have bugs... but I digress.
What you are describing is "Source available", which is a fairly common practice. Many large "open source" projects with a paid tier will have proprietary code in the repo for all to inspect, but it doesn't make those features open source. Microsoft has a special program for governments and institutions to inspect certain product code.
> A programmer working on a project for a large corporation—as I was told—shouldn’t even be reading code that is licensed under, for instance, GPL. In effect, absorbing information from that code and “repurposing” it in a new solution would constitute an intellectual property rights violation if not expressly permitted by the license.
Wait a minute. Reading some GPL’ed code and then writing a new thing, based on the ideas you’ve learned from the code, can be an intellectual property rights violation?
That would likely depend on the meaning of "based on" (not a lawyer here!), and the actual lawyers would feel very happy charging exorbitant sums for arguing it out in court. As any sensible corporation (that is not deriving its income from lawyer's fees) would like to avoid that so the easiest approach would be "don't look at GPL code".
That raises an interesting question though. If I read the code, remember it, and then re-type it as is, that'd obviously fall under license's terms. But if I write an ML process, that knows to read code, understand it, and reproduce it, and it ends up reproducing the said code byte-for-byte, is that considered copying too? Suppose I didn't intend for ML process to work that way, I just programmed it in a way to find optimal solutions, and trained it on a dataset of GPL code, and it happened that this particular piece of GPL code, byte-for-byte, was chosen by the ML algorithm as optimal. Did I copy the code? Did I violate the license even earlier, when training the ML model on GPL code?
Ideas? No. Expressions? Yes. Github Copilot arguably copies protectable expressions. Microsoft is banking on the fact that nobody will sue them over it because it involves projects that cannot defend themselves, and because they will endlessly argue over where the line between ideas and protectable expressions is.
TL;DR Microsoft is being Microsoft again. Also water is wet.
The first few paragraphs sum up a lot of stuff I was thinking for the last years or decade. Microsoft and Google are still scummy corporations and operate on bad faith and abuse their legal power to prosecute people for no reason other than loss aversion, as per the American status quo.
As just a simple thought exercise, imagine if you wrote a fictional book that takes place on the moon, and you took a whopping entire paragraph out of one of JK Rowlings harry potter books, now imagine that you changed a few of the adjectives or pronouns and pasted it in.
I mean yeah legally there might be some level of copyright infringement here but that little fragment constitutes less than one percent of Rawlings work, and your entire book doesn't even follow the same plot as the Harry Potter book. Nobody gives a crap.
I also feel like there's a bit of a double standard, how many people knowingly lift things wholesale from Stack overflow without requiring and including the required attribution? How many times have you found a snippet of code online and implemented it in your code base without determining whether you need to provide attribution?
People are getting all worked up over basically nothing, in more than 90% of use cases for copilot you just wanted to fill out a basic boiler plate level function, and it does so beautifully.
> When property ownership disappears, all natural rights do.
Statements like this undermines their argument. Microsoft secures all sorts of rights under their EULA and is contractual. Enforcing property ownership is exactly how Microsoft has risen to dominance. And that is to say nothing of the a-historicism of this explanation of property rights.
is it common to group IP rights into "natural rights"? any argument i've heard for property rights emerging from "natural rights" has been reasoned from the resource in question being scarce (and hence, my taking of your property immediately deprives you of that resource). i've never heard the argument "my copying of your property deprives you of the benefits from some future interaction i would have otherwise voluntarily entered into" argued from a natural rights perspective.
Readit News
I set up a blog this weekend using Hugo, Ansible, and Github Actions to host it on NearlyFreeSpeech.NET. It "only" took two days, but I'm exhausted and I don't actually have any content yet.
I host Plex and TiddlyWiki at home on my Raspberry Pi. I used docker and traefik. Sometimes it still has weird issues and I have to reboot it. It was another project that "only" took a weekend and left me exhausted.
So let's say I don't want to self host, but I don't want to use Github. What are my options? I used to use Bitbucket, but I moved to Github a few years ago to consolidate my accounts. I liked Bitbucket, but people give you weird looks when you give them a Bitbucket URL. It's not as seamlessly supported in apps that can automatically understand Github urls. Confluence kept buying other products and tacking them on. And they kept trying to upsell me.
Then there's Gitlab. I'm going to have to get used to it because my employer is transitioning to it, away from Github. This article mentions developers having short memories. I remember when Gitlab decidedly said they'll do business with anyone back when people were shaming tech companies for helping and cooperating with ICE a few years ago. That left a bad taste in my mouth.
There's Sourcehut. But I have friends with beef with the guy who made it and I don't want to support him.
I can't help but feel like Github is probably the lesser evil here. Honestly, I'd pay for a service if I believed in it. It's important to me that I'm the customer, not the product. That's why I switched from Gmail to ProtonMail a few years ago. I have their top tier paid account because I believe in them and I want to get what I pay for.
Sorry, I don't really have a point. I'm just tired of this argument. I'd self host in a second if I could do it quickly, easily, and reliably. But I don't think I can.
Part of the complexity is that the effects aren't all immediate, and humans aren't good at thinking long term. People put code on GH for years and then Microsoft took it and undermined those same developers. So it might seem like zero hassle right now, but it's probably big destruction later on.
Personally I'm growing an allergy to these kinds of "no catch, we promise" services. What they usually mean is "we sell your data to other marketers, governments, and potential bad actors", "we try to hypnotize you with ads", "we aren't actually giving you this thing and we'll delist it whenever we want", or worse.
I know this doesn't respond to your issue, my weak effort there is that are a fair number of hosts for things like nextcloud and gitlab. My brother runs a substantial suite of services all through Docker and admins it almost not at all. This stuff is possible, but I agree it's harder than signing into GH with SSO and pushing code. All I'm saying is that there are other costs, you just don't pay until way later.
EDIT: Oh my god. I think I understand Sqlite and Fossil a little better now.
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[1] https://sourcehut.org/
[2] https://codeberg.org/
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I could see how this would leave a bad taste in your mouth, but I'm not sure it follows that Github is the lesser evil.
I can't think of specific examples (aside from the EEE philosophy brought up in the post and copilot if you consider that to be a Bad Thing), but Microsoft seems to have done plenty of Bad Stuff in the past. Maybe a comparable amount, if not more, Bad Stuff than GitLab?
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Self-hosting should become absurdly easy to become widely popular, and to become any popular around non-technical users.
Very easy Linux host setup (like that of AWS, Linode, DO, etc) + containers (podman or docker) or stuff like flatpack or appimage should solve most of that problem. What's missing form the picture is an easy (I mean laughably easy) way to connect services. Something like a patch panel should be created to control UFW / traefik / whatever, when apps don't snap together automatically.
What's their beef if you don't mind me asking? Drew seems like a nice enough guy. He is very opinionated obviously, but he's created many amazing FOSS projects.
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It depends on your requirements, but I found Gitea to be really easy to set up.
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Things that take time cost money, because time is valuable. You can pay in money to self-host, or you can pay in time, or you can pay in privacy and marketing, but you can't just get it for free.
But your post gave me an idea I won't discuss in public, thanks.
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Granted people in business get a sugar rush when they see something that looks like working code generated automatically but at best it is doing the 20% of the work that seems to get you 80% of the way there except taking the bugs out of something written mindlessly is a stupendously expensive process.
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At it's core, open source is not about The Internet at all. Open Source is about being able to look at the source of the software you have. If someone gives me (or god forbid I buy) some software, can I inspect the source? If yes, then it's Open Source.
Putting code on the internet is another thing entirely. Related, sure; but ultimately not at all the same. In fact, there's so much "open source" crap out there that doesn't even compile, build, or run, that isn't Open Source at all! OK, maybe it still is, software is allowed to have bugs... but I digress.
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Wait a minute. Reading some GPL’ed code and then writing a new thing, based on the ideas you’ve learned from the code, can be an intellectual property rights violation?
That raises an interesting question though. If I read the code, remember it, and then re-type it as is, that'd obviously fall under license's terms. But if I write an ML process, that knows to read code, understand it, and reproduce it, and it ends up reproducing the said code byte-for-byte, is that considered copying too? Suppose I didn't intend for ML process to work that way, I just programmed it in a way to find optimal solutions, and trained it on a dataset of GPL code, and it happened that this particular piece of GPL code, byte-for-byte, was chosen by the ML algorithm as optimal. Did I copy the code? Did I violate the license even earlier, when training the ML model on GPL code?
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TL;DR Microsoft is being Microsoft again. Also water is wet.
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I mean yeah legally there might be some level of copyright infringement here but that little fragment constitutes less than one percent of Rawlings work, and your entire book doesn't even follow the same plot as the Harry Potter book. Nobody gives a crap.
I also feel like there's a bit of a double standard, how many people knowingly lift things wholesale from Stack overflow without requiring and including the required attribution? How many times have you found a snippet of code online and implemented it in your code base without determining whether you need to provide attribution?
People are getting all worked up over basically nothing, in more than 90% of use cases for copilot you just wanted to fill out a basic boiler plate level function, and it does so beautifully.
Statements like this undermines their argument. Microsoft secures all sorts of rights under their EULA and is contractual. Enforcing property ownership is exactly how Microsoft has risen to dominance. And that is to say nothing of the a-historicism of this explanation of property rights.
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https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/11/lenovo_secured_core/