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Comment by nirvdrum | Hacker News Reader

You’re assuming people are self-hosting open source projects on their gut servers. That’s often not the case. Even if it were, GitHub irked a lot of people using their code to train Copilot.

I self-host gitea. It took maybe 5 minutes to set up on TrueNAS and even that was only because I wanted to set up different datasets so I could snapshot independently. I love it. I have privacy. Integrating into a backup strategy is quite easy —- it goes along with the rest of my off-site NAS backup without me needing to retain local clones on my desktop. And my CI runners are substantially faster than what I get through GitHub Actions.

The complexity and maintenance burden of self-hosting is way overblown. The benefits are often understated and the deficiencies of whatever hosted service left unaddressed.

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Microsoft/GitHub has no model training. How do you think Copilot works? Also if you provide open source, people and companies are gonna use it.

When I publish open source code, I don't mind if people or companies use it, or maybe even learn from it. What I don't like is feeding it into a giant plagiarism machine that is perpetuating the centralization of power on the internet.

to me plagiarism is a 100% copy of intellectual property or maybe a high percentage, like 80%+

LLMs don't store the code, only the probability chains of tokens (words). AFAIK this is not plagiarism.

I remember the later 2000s, when a German company called "Rocket Internet" was copycatting companies like AirBnB, Zappos and others. Many consider this lame and some kind of moral freeloading, it's not prohibited.

> Microsoft/GitHub has no model training. How do you think Copilot works?

I'm sure if you used that big, smug brain of yours you'd piece together exactly what I meant. Here's a search query to get the juices flowing:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Whether you agree with why someone may be opting to self-host a git server is immaterial to why they've done so. Likewise, I'm not going to rehash the debate over fair use vs software licenses. Pretending like you don't understand why someone that published code under a copyleft license is displeased with it being locked in a proprietary model being used to build proprietary software is willful ignorance. But, again, it makes no difference whether you're right or they're right; no one is obligated to continue pushing open source code to GitHub or any other service.

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