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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>There's Sourcehut. But I have friends with beef with the guy who made it and I don't want to support him.<p>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.<p>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.
So far as I am concerned the story with GitHub copilot is "Nothing more to see here, move on folks."<p>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.<p>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 <i>you have</i>. If someone gives me (or god forbid I buy) some software, can I inspect the source? If yes, then it's Open Source.<p>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.
> 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.<p>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?
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 <i>entire paragraph</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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?<p>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.<p>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.
Another reason to boycott Microsoft’s Pluton PCs that refuse to boot OSes other than Windows.<p><a href="https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/11/lenovo_secured_core/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/11/lenovo_secured_core/</a>
How is self-hosting protecting from Copilot infringing on your license? One can imagine Copilot fetching your self-hosted repo and adding it to its database, or someone forking your self-hosted repo, hosting it on github which will still be used by Copilot. The issue of respecting the license of Open Source code by these "AIs" it orthogonal to where the source is being hosted.<p>I have no problem with Copilot and other "AIs" using my source code, as long as they respect the license. If copilot spits out (even partially) my GPL code it is still GPL. Other than that - it's free and open for corporate and personal use.
fun and worthy post @! as someone who is "old enough to remember the events of the 90s" this captures so much in the intro paragraphs, with humor and without lecturing. Sure it misses important nuance here and there.. but overall, well done! thanks, recommended
you're not self-hosting. you're using a managed hosting product. Digital Ocean (an entity which is not your <i>self</i>) is hosting things for you. On top of that this blog is hosted by Substack (also not your self). nothing intrinsically wrong with either of those, but if you simultaneously espouse the greatness of "self-hosting" and the awfulness of "cake-eating corporations" then this comes off as egregiously phony.
I'm gonna be honest: I don't get the outrage over Copilot. To me, it's obviously totally unobjectionable. If journalists were getting outraged that their newspaper columns were being consumed as GPT training data, we'd correctly call that silly: it's public text now, so long as you're not reproducing it verbatim and thus violating copyright, users can consume it for whatever purpose they see fit.
All these instructions for self hosting various services are looking like guides for rsync-based backup before Dropbox. We need some easy way to set up self hosting of all the popular decentralized systems at once with good security, proper backups, etc ready to go out of the box. Of course it needs to make migration away to true self hosting easy.<p>Or even something like a Raspberry Pi in a case with all this stuff.
MSFT is something else. Almost all developers were against Microsoft in the 2000s. Then they "embraced" OSS and Linux since they knew that going against developers would not get them far in the long run.<p>"Honeymoon" phase<p>They were catering to devs with free tools like vscode, WSL, etc..., A generous tier for GitHub (GitHub was bleeding devs right after they announced ms just bought them), etc..., Basically, pampering us.<p>"True colors" phase<p>The honeymoon is over and now they're showing their true colors. Copilot (devs do the heavy lifting stuff and they get all the goodies), vscode with different flavors (c# related issues), sunsetted atom in favor of vscode (one less competitor), etc..<p>There so much the dev community can tolerate before going nuclear on them.
Am I mis-reading it? the article claims Microsoft had an internal policy of "embrace, extend, extinguish". As proof it links to Wikipedia. Wikipedia does not corroborate this. Instead it says some journalist made up that phrase. Microsoft themselves had "embrace, extend, innovate" which is a fully reasonable position
>These programmers have seemingly imagined a fantasy land in which Microsoft is now totally-on-board with the Richard Stallman free software fairyland socialist utopia.<p>Nobody imagines that. But nobody besides a very small group is on board with stallman anyways. That microsoft recognizes the value of open source to their bottom line is sufficient.
First they came for the cashiers, and I did not speak out—<p><pre><code> Because I was not a cashier.
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Then they came for the taxi drivers, and I did not speak out—<p><pre><code> Because I was not a taxi driver.
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Then they came for the hotels, and I did not speak out—<p><pre><code> Because I owned a second property I could rent.
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Then they came for me—and—and—holy shit this is totally unacceptable! You can't automate MY livelihood away!!