[GNC-dev] GnuCash and Github

[Geert Janssens]

That's a good analysis of the situation.

I agree this is largely a legal issue to be solved by organisations like the SFC.

At a deeper level though I agree this could only have happened because OSS has allowed 
github to become such a golden cage for our projects in the first place. And this seems to 
happen over and over again.

It has become very hard to leave github because of the network effect. And I agree we can't 
make others not have a clone of the gnucash repo on github. That doesn't mean we can't 
make a statement by not hosting our own forks/clones there ourselves if we care enough.

I don't know if *I* care enough. I am concerned about these developments,  but at the same 
time I wouldn't want to add more infrastructure maintenance to our already limited time.

SFC suggested a few alternatives, either hosted (sourcehut, codeberg) or self-hosted (gitea, 
gitlab CE, sourcehut).

Codeberg is very similar to github, except for CI (which is currently in closed beta). So it 
offers much of what our users/contributors are already used to.
I don't know about the others.

As a last semi-OT remark/rant, I think all the alternatives are missing a key piece - federation.

You either have a centrally hosted platform(codeberg.org,...), or you have completely 
isolated islands that happen to use the same software (think gitlab.gnome.org, 
gitlab.kitware.com,...)

The centrally hosted platforms will invariably lead to similar silo effects as github.com or 
gitlab.com if they become more successful. The islands on the other hand currently have no 
means of interaction or integration (like tracking an issue issue on another 'island's' tracker, 
forking to another 'island', creating pull requests across 'islands',...). So in both cases the 
very distributed nature of git is not brought up to the level of the web interfaces.

The social media landscape is in the same boat in fact, though federation may very slowly be 
getting a foot in the door with the recent twitter debacle and a fair number of users now 
start to experiment with Mastodon.

Regards,

Geert

Op zondag 13 november 2022 20:50:53 CET schreef john:
> My number one use of GitHub, and IIRC the reason we mirrored it there in the
> first place, is to refer to and reference code when communicating on these
> lists, bug reports, and IRC. That's replaceable too by serving the repo
> ourselves or moving the mirror back to Sourceforge.
> 
> The fear is that Github's copilot will violate our author's copyrights by
> copying sufficiently substantial sections of code into a non-GPL project,
> stripping off the copyright and license in the process. I've seen claims
> that this has already happened.
> 
> In my completely non-legal opinion that makes every project that uses
> CoPilot GPL and the FSF should be suing all of them to publish their source
> code. But I think that's also true of any project whose developers read
> Stack Overflow or search on the web for solutions to their coding problems.
> The world has changed since the GPL was conceived and sharing source code
> meant sending me a blank DECTape and a paid mailer or downloading a tarball
> by anonymous FTP and code on the web--regardless of where--is findable by
> web-searching for a function name, and even if we don't provide web access
> someone else will. The GPL encourages that.
> 
> Plus the bird has flown. Sure, we could take down our Github repo. That
> won't affect the 673 forks, and some of those folks will get our code from
> somewhere and keep their repos up to date.
> 
> In fact it seems to me that the Software Freedom Conservancy is missing the
> point: The problem with Copilot isn't that it's encouraging
> proprietary-software developers to use open-source code in their projects.
> Although the GPL requires that using GPL code turns the project into a GPL
> one, most other FLOSS licenses don't. They require only that copyright