June

Jul 21, 2021

Please welcome June Tate-Gans, @jtgans

Embedded software engineer. #VICE and #V128 developer.

July 21 to 28 on @imakefoss

Interview: https://t.co/804IM19Lyv

@imakefoss is a rotation curation account, a blog and a YouTube channel. https://t.co/zCVeUFNVd4

Jul 21, 2021

Hey folks! Glad to take on the next rotation for the IMakeFOSS team!

Jul 21, 2021

Can’t say I’ve done much of this team tweeting thing before, but we’ll see how it goes! As the interview says, I’m a #VICE and #V128 developer, and I was the author of the dual head mode in the SDL frontend for VICE.

Jul 21, 2021

I’ve been involved in FOSS for a long long time as a user, and as a developer (since the 90’s!), and with the source for things being as open as they are these days, it only makes sense to continue that tradition by working on both FOSS and hardware projects both.

Jul 22, 2021

So this seems to be a bit of an unpopular opinion, and some IP lawyers seem to brush it off, but CoPilot itself is actually a derivative work of GPL’d source code.

Jul 22, 2021

IANAL, but if Oracle can bring Google to task over MIN and MAX, single line, obvious functions, and music publishing companies like Apple Music can bring other musicians to task over things as simple as a drum beat, I’d argue that there is a case here.

Jul 22, 2021

Fair use can only be tested in the courts because it’s based on the reasonableness test – IOW, it’s up to the judge to determine what is considered to be ‘fair use".

Jul 22, 2021

Mind, this is viewed through the lens of US copyright law, which is what I know personally because I’ve studied it, but it is a problem: copyright owners hosting code on Github have licenses associated with their works. Question is: can a Terms of Service override that license?

Jul 22, 2021

Github’s ToS states under section D.4 that they are implicitly granted the right to ‘…parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers…", but they also allow for your licenses, but “This license does not grant GitHub the right to sell Your Content”

Jul 22, 2021

So the other question is: does this terms of service grant Github implicitly the right to make a derivative work and sell that as a service?

Jul 22, 2021

The existential threat here is not that CoPilot produces derivative works of itself – it’s that Github has knowingly created a derivative work without respect of the license, and used CoPilot to create more derivative works internal to Github itself for many years.

Jul 22, 2021

Because of the veil of corporate secrecy, we cannot know how many license violations lie in Github’s own codebase.

Jul 22, 2021

There is one other clause in GH’s TOS that gives me pause: ‘You retain all moral rights to Your Content that you upload, publish, or submit to any part of the Service, including the rights of integrity and attribution."

Jul 22, 2021

This would give us the ability to call them out legally in a court over this, but they cover it with this addendum: ‘However, you waive these rights and agree not to assert them against us, to enable us to reasonably exercise the rights granted in Section D.4, but not otherwise."

Jul 22, 2021

In short, GH’s TOS allows them to hide attribution and integrity if they need. So it’s a toss up: does their TOS allow them to create CoPilot and run it as a pay-for service? Unclear. That’s why we need our day in court.

Jul 22, 2021

Ah, been forgetting to sign my tweets – apologies! This whole thread was by @jtgans. :D

Jul 22, 2021

@jtgans In any case, this should give every FOSS developer who hosts code on GH pause. We collectively, need to consider these cases when we decide to post our code publicly on servers we don’t own or fully trust – the devil is always in the details. @jtgans

Jul 22, 2021

In a related thought: git and mercurial both are distributed systems designed to be able to work without upstream servers. The trick with them is that you have to either participate on a mailing list, or have a publicly visible system to push to.

Jul 22, 2021

Perhaps we should instead consider pushing to a globally distributed system such as IPFS? @jtgans

Jul 22, 2021

Something else to consider: https://t.co/bsLQypadXC vs. https://t.co/mcrjdYz0X2 vs. https://t.co/0tZtCs7U14 are very different.

Jul 22, 2021

SourceHut states ‘Upon upload, you grant https://t.co/niYg6Xtrdu a non-exclusive and indefinite license to use and display your content in ways required for the appropriate operation of our services." and that’s it. Nothing more.

Jul 22, 2021

SourceForge/Slashdot’s terms of service don’t even grant Slashdot media license at all, and instead fall back on the OSI approved licenses of the source code being uploaded, going as far as stating that the code must also be made ‘human readable".

Jul 22, 2021

So, basically, just about anything is better than GH. While we’re at it, let’s take a look at GitLab’s ToS: https://t.co/RW6LEjvfqy

Jul 22, 2021

GitLab’s ToS is much much more complex than any of the other three, and is broken up into multiple agreements. The one we’re concerned with is the Subscription Agreement, here: https://t.co/abvYiMSJZ8

Jul 22, 2021

While more wordy and very specific relating to ‘Customer Content", the subscription agreement gives no requirements on license needs of the source, or any grants to the source code for GitLab themselves.

Jul 22, 2021

So in short, literally anything else other than GitHub is better than GitHub in terms of freedom of license, ownership, and author’s wishes. @jtgans

Jul 22, 2021

@jtgans This is, of course, bearing in mind that these terms of service still put us at a disadvantage: when we host code on someone else’s system, they have the right to change the ToS at any time. It’s easy to ‘fork" or just push bits around, but choosing to use a service is heavy.

Jul 22, 2021

@jtgans Folks like Debian and GNU figured this stuff out years ago, and continue to host their own services as needed. It’s time we smaller project developers started thinking it through, too. We’ve been taken in by GH, by our own failure, and now they’re flexing their ToS at us.

Jul 22, 2021

@jtgans Personally, I rue the day I moved my own stuff off of machines I ran myself. It was a deliberate loss of freedom because I ‘couldn’t be bothered" to run the servers anymore, but it’s clear now that it was a mistake.

Jul 22, 2021

@jtgans Time to roll up my sleeves and get to work hosting my own stuff again! :D @jtgans

Jul 23, 2021

RT @OpenSourceOrg: Everyone’s been talking about GitHub’s recently announced Copilot tool, a new AI-powered code assistant. So, we started…

Jul 23, 2021

‘So is Copilot code going to be considered a reasonable use of that corpus, a violation of trust (or even maybe copyright), or will AI eventually just be how most code gets written? It’s truly too early for a conclusive hot-take." Couldn’t say it better than that. https://t.co/L7sTyeLKFb

Jul 23, 2021

TBH, I’m not sure how an IP lawyer worth their salt could honestly say to their clients that there is no risk here, or that there aren’t any issues with this. The legality is not clear, at all. @jtgans

Jul 23, 2021

@CarlKDE @jtgans Oh, I totally forgot about https://t.co/Ca03Go1gQ8. Should examine that in more detail sometime. :D

Jul 23, 2021

@CarlKDE @jtgans - @jtgans

Jul 23, 2021

@morganjohn234 @jtgans @giteaio @codeberg_org I was thinking of running a Gitea instance, personally. https://t.co/ozcSNuSrRC is still someone else’s machine.