I just hope it doesn't end in Microsoft paying some (from their perspective) small fine that is just the cost of doing business.
https://jacquesmattheij.com/what-is-wrong-with-microsoft-buy...
What do you use instead?
The top alternatives in my opinion are:
- SourceHut https://sr.ht/
- Codeberg https://codeberg.org/
- Self-hosted using Forgejo https://forgejo.org/ (fork of Gitea)
I was self-hosting my code with Gitea for a while but currently I’m using GitHub. Planning on setting up a Forgejo instance in the coming weeks.
At work we use GitLab, but personally it is one of my least favourite platforms, so I am excluding GitLab from the list above.
Forgejo is a fork of Gitea, not Gitlab.
The most likely of which – if this lawsuit ends up winning – is that corporations will have new ways to sue everyone and that the world will be a worse place.
Copyright expansion has never benefited the "little guy" such as Open Source authors, only large entities with deep pockets who can litigate to no end.
People will quote that John Carmack Doom example where it copies the function verbatim, but as far as I can tell that's a rare thing, and it's a function that's been widely copied around without proper licensing; a human could also get it wrong by copying it from github.com/random-person/mit-project with the wrong license (and since then there's also been work to prevent this kind of thing).
Co-pilot isn't unique, or the first AI/ML project to use copyrighted works; all the GPT models use copyrighted works as their input. Some doubts have been raised over the legality of that too, but it's received nowhere near the amount of criticism that Co-Pilot has, certainly not on HN, and I've never seen anyone doubt the morality of it – only the legality.
If you were to go through my public open source code I'm sure you can find stuff that's very similar to some code from my previous employers or other open source projects. Not because I copy/pasted anything, but because my brain was trained on that dataset: you see or write something that works, you face a similar problem a few years later, you write a similar solution.
"Using existing works as input" is common throughout creative works. As Phil Anselmo once said: "with Pantera we took our five favourite bands and ripped 'em off to hell".
People are already getting sued because "that one melody sounds a bit similar to this other melody"; fair use is already widely ignored/disrespected. Much will depend on the exact details, but any win in this lawsuit has a very real chance of empowering that sort of nonsense.
A union of creative minds seems long overdue. It can provide a copyright trust, addressing your concerns, as well as removing the excuse of inability to get permission from n thousand creators used. It can also address matter beyond OSS, such as overreaching employment agreement clauses that assert ownership of everything in your head.
[Possibly 'trust' is more suitable than 'union'. Something like Creative Commons Trust.]
But what prevents Microsoft from harvesting open-source code from any hosting site? What have you gained?
Parking tickets should start at 50% of your yearly take home income. Didn't feed the meter an extra quarter? $10k minimum sounds fair.
Pay is not profits, it's revenue.
All of those build their models based on the same sources and it's therefore a much more general issue than just one particular company being sued.
But that doesn't make it right in this case and, conveniently, someone has decided to bring suit. The funny thing is that Microsoft depends on Copyright law for their existence and now they want to change the rules to favor them when it suits them. In fact one of the first things that Bill Gates ever did that I remember is bitch about people copying the software that he wrote.