[HN Gopher] Evaluating new software forges
___________________________________________________________________
Evaluating new software forges
Author : riidom
Score : 133 points
Date : 2023-12-17 12:26 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (notgull.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (notgull.net)
| saurik wrote:
| I was hoping for an evaluation of Radicle--the only forge that
| seemed to be doing something exciting and "new", and one I
| haven't had the time to really analyze yet--but... no such luck
| :(.
| riidom wrote:
| Wow that looks crazy!
|
| Link: https://radicle.xyz
|
| But honestly, I also wouldn't write about this without a lot of
| usage experience. For sure it's different from github/-lab etc.
| exciting and new, as you say.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| I'm not sure you'd want any forge evaluated by this author:
| they're extremely caustic, negative, and critical. Jaded people
| in tech like this I just try and avoid, especially when they
| come out against unalloyed good tech like containerization.
| Containers are just namespaces with additions. They've allowed
| us to narrow the gap of capability between the big three OSes,
| even if the other two need to virtualize Linux to do so.
|
| There's also nothing wrong with LLMs. How you choose to
| integrate them into your life or forge is a choice but at the
| end of the day they're just another tool in the toolbelt. Pick
| what you want or need and leave the rest. I'm not forced to use
| Copilot but I appreciate it when I need it.
| k__ wrote:
| There is also https://protocol.land and https://gitopia.com.
| RealStickman_ wrote:
| The layout of radicle.land is unfortunately pretty broken on
| mobile.
| k__ wrote:
| Yes, it's only a month old or something. Pretty early
| project.
| BHSPitMonkey wrote:
| What is radicle.land? Both radicle.xyz and app.radicle.xyz
| seem fine for me on Firefox mobile. Did something change in
| the last few hours?
| k__ wrote:
| They probably meant protocol.land.
| rapnie wrote:
| The latter is Web3/crypto la la land, and the former.. dunno,
| got to read the code, but I would like to know about the
| project, its goals, and who is behind it.
| k__ wrote:
| Both (and Radicle) are web3.
|
| So, it's probably not your jive.
| Klonoar wrote:
| Wow! So glad someone mentioned this - I've been looking for
| something like it, going to have to set aside time to try it
| out.
| natdempk wrote:
| https://pierre.co/ is another interesting one, focused on a
| product-development workflow.
| idlephysicist wrote:
| What is a Product Engineer? Is it just another name for an
| engineer?
| natdempk wrote:
| Yeah, I don't think there is any meaningful distinction
| there. I think Pierre is just framing things in terms of
| solving for teams that work with product + design +
| engineering to ship something to users that involves all of
| those parties, whereas GitHub has primarily catered to
| engineering.
|
| Today in software companies there is basically a gap where
| each discipline kinda prefers to work in it's own software
| silo (eg. Asana / Figma / GitHub), but that doesn't really
| make a lot of sense from a fundamental standpoint where all
| of those aspects of a team want to work very closely
| together. You end up kinda syncing a lot of info/state
| across the silos, or via meetingss/slack etc, so I think
| Pierre is trying to bring all that into one tool with some
| opinionated workflow. Makes a lot of sense from my
| perspective, curious how it ends up working out.
| Klonoar wrote:
| Would've been curious for the authors take on OneDev as well.
| aulisius wrote:
| Coincidentally, I've been mulling the same idea for a week now. A
| self-hostable source forge + registry to serve artifacts would be
| amazing.
|
| I think the only thing you'd lose is the 'social' aspects of
| GitHub, but I believe that can be made up with a combination of
| rss feeds (?), ActivityPub etc.
| godber wrote:
| I think we've been thinking similarly. Decentralization will
| have it's costs. I've been thinking Opt-In centralized search
| for personal repos, maybe as a gitea (or other self hosted
| options) plug-in. But as you suggest, maybe existing features
| can be leveraged to prove the social/discoverability.
| Ayesh wrote:
| Having tried GitHub, GitLab, Source Hut, Codeberg, and BitBucket
| (RIP), I think the only serious options are GitHub, GitLab self
| hosted, and Source Hut.
|
| GitHub owned by MSFT aside, and also putting their AI push _also_
| aside, GitHub has things like Sponsors, Dependabot, and code
| scanning that you won't find anywhere else. They sure are luring
| you into ecosystems that require a huge escape velocity, but
| GitHub serves as less-friction entry point to open source
| software.
|
| GitLab self hosting is also nice and flexible, but it has a more
| "enterprise open source" feeling to it. Debian and Drupal can
| take advantage of it, but I don't see myself hosting mini
| projects like my mini CSS library that is also used by three
| other strangers.
|
| Source Hut is really nice too. Admittedly I don't like email
| based workflows, so I haven't really thought about moving
| anything there. But Source Hut has "unlisted" repos, which I
| thought was really clever and missing from other forges.
| isilofi wrote:
| > Dependabot, and code scanning that you won't find anywhere
| else.
|
| Gitlab has equivalents you can enable as CI pipelines.
| lolinder wrote:
| So do other forges: I have Renovate [0] set up on my self-
| hosted Forgejo and it's worked great so far.
|
| [0] https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate
| mst wrote:
| Having been using gitea at work for a while as an "internal
| mini-github" (along with a github organisation for stuff that
| isn't purely internal or would otherwise benefit for that) I
| have to say it ... hasn't annoyed me noticeably.
|
| So I think I'd put gitea* on that list as well.
|
| (I don't think I disagree with your opinions about the ones you
| -have- listed)
|
| * and I mean that to include forgejo, I think, though I haven't
| tried it so YMMV
| meibo wrote:
| > and Source Hut
|
| Not a very serious option if you're looking for anyone from the
| 21st century to contribute to your project. No, the email
| workflow doesn't get better by just screaming "it's not that
| bad!" over and over again.
|
| I'm looking forward to the federation work that is being done
| for forgejo, that will be big if it works out as it seems like
| it will.
| paradox460 wrote:
| Also, the founder has an unfortunate history of just up and
| abandoning his projects when they stop being fun for him. I
| used his media host/imgur alternative in the past, and it
| spontaneously just disappeared one day. I'd rather that not
| happen to my source code
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > I used his media host/imgur alternative in the past, and
| it spontaneously just disappeared one day. I'd rather that
| not happen to my source code
|
| Git is decentralized.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| Git is decentralized. Ticketing systems and mailing lists
| as found on SourceHut and many other forges aren't.
|
| And if SourceHut disappears, what would you do with the
| repository? You'd upload it to a new forge, but how would
| you tell users where to find it, how would the users know
| this is the original source and not a hostile fork? It's
| better to pick a stable, trustworthy. and 21st-century
| place like GitHub or GitLab instead of SourceHut.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > It's better to pick a stable, trustworthy. and 21st-
| century place like GitHub or GitLab instead of SourceHut.
|
| It's better to not make yourself (much) dependent on
| functionalities that only the respective software forge
| provides.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| What would you suggest instead? How would you replace
| pull requests, or even sending patches via email to
| mailing lists?
| potatopatch wrote:
| I'd don't really see a difference between sending an
| email to a list or to a maintainer. Maybe that's an
| argument for not adding and adapting to unnecessary
| concepts like a web based pull request.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| What if there's more than one maintainer? How do you
| build any sort of community without a place for
| discussion?
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > > and Source Hut
|
| > Not a very serious option if you're looking for anyone from
| the 21st century to contribute to your project. No, the email
| workflow doesn't get better by just screaming "it's not that
| bad!" over and over again.
|
| Perhaps the maintainers of the respective project consider
| filtering out contributions from "hipster programmers"
| actually desirable for the project. :-)
| johnny22 wrote:
| Can't say i feel much like a hipster programmer after doing
| some amount of programming for 20 years. I still prefer the
| github approach.
| plagiarist wrote:
| Are the hipsters the ones using email or refusing to use
| email? I could see a dude rolling up on a penny farthing to
| explain why email is the one true workflow. But he'll be
| embarrassed when a more powerful hipster shows up using a
| telegraph to send diffs by wire.
| ForkMeOnTinder wrote:
| I'm curious what you thought was missing from Codeberg.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| GitHub Sponsors is pretty great. Seems like a perfectly ethical
| way for open source developers to earn money. Doesn't depend on
| copyright, artificial scarcity, advertising. I really like it.
| dboreham wrote:
| Quick note that Gitea has its own CI (roughly Github Actions
| compatible) so you don't need to use Drone.
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| Is not hard for me to see a case being built around the idea of
| finding value in having code to stay excluded from the surface
| exposed to AI so it becomes impossible for it to predate it.
|
| It's a type of "security" that doesn't find an answer in "better
| AIs" or "AIs with improved alignment". The value comes out of
| being safe from the risk that can come out of the humans in
| control of these AIs.
|
| I comes out of staying away and making impossible for any and all
| AIs to touch it.
|
| Like the difference between food from a chef and
| hyperindustrialized food.
|
| What if you want chef food only?
|
| In the same way, exclusively human software creations.
| Jgrubb wrote:
| I like this analogy but I guess I see it more like man
| inventing the knife, so he doesn't have to rip the animal to
| shreds with his bare hands anymore.
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| Except the knives do not have the capacity to give parts of
| the protein to other knives users surreptitiously and it's in
| AI's very nature to absolutely do that.
| steezeburger wrote:
| Does the chef not use tools?
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| Robot chefs are tools? Are they chefs?
| ahepp wrote:
| Shall we call it the "slow code movement"?
| btreecat wrote:
| I think it's time we collectively mature past the point where
| taking unsubstantiated pot-shots at tools we don't "love" is seen
| as a value add to commentary.
|
| In this case calling k8s a "nightmare" is a strong red flag akin
| to the mantra of "java is slow". It lacks the nuance of hands on
| XP and reeks of rules of thumb miss applied to the point of
| catchphrases.
| steezeburger wrote:
| Sad to see this down voted. I agree. They also sound
| insufferable. Maybe it's just their writing style, trying to be
| inflammatory for engagement, but they are not someone I would
| want to work with.
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| You and the parent seem to dislike the author sharing their
| _opinions_ on things on _their own blog_. And yet you 're
| happy to share your own dismissive opinions on the author
| here.
|
| FWIW I find the author's _obviously subjective_ opinions on
| their tools much more valuable than your _obviously
| subjective_ opinions of this author.
| meepmorp wrote:
| > You and the parent seem to dislike the author sharing
| their opinions on things on their own blog
|
| At least w.r.t. the original comment, this seems like a
| misunderstanding. GP was saying that, absent any
| explanation for why the author came to the opinions they
| did, the article doesn't say much of value. They don't
| dislike the author sharing their opinions on the author's
| own blog.
| steezeburger wrote:
| I don't care if the author shares their opinions, but I'm
| free to share mine as well, and I agreed with the parent
| comment at the time it was downvoted.
|
| I've just been noticing a trend of people, like the article
| author, who are quick to dismiss things for reasons that
| are inconsistent and dogmatic. Why be so close minded? I
| think it's okay to be dismissive of the dismissive. Which,
| I didn't really dismiss him did I? I read his entire
| article.
| Klonoar wrote:
| They're not saying that the author can't post whatever they
| want on their blog.
|
| They're saying that we, as a community, should not elevate
| unsubstantiated writing that comes across as "I don't truly
| understand these things or have deep experience, but this
| is what everyone else says on every other blog post or
| comment, and I'm parroting it".
|
| I would add on to it that I feel there's sometimes a real
| thing in these discussions where reviews like these often
| come from people just tinkering and looking for the next
| thing to mindlessly experiment with. It's not always
| representative of real world trade offs.
|
| (I say all this as someone who self hosts a Gitea instance)
| morelisp wrote:
| I have (with a team) built a couple on-prem Kubernetes
| clusters that handle billions of requests per day, as
| well as written Kubernetes controllers and operators.
|
| Kubernetes is a nightmare, and I'm glad that some people
| are not afraid to point out the state of the emperor's
| outfit.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| I disagree and think it's time we all moved on from
| kneejerk hating anything either a. new or b.
| misunderstood. That includes things like AI, containers
| and Kubernetes.
|
| Kubernetes started in a rough shape but it has been
| chiseled over the years to be boring tech that just works
| and provides a layer of abstraction to build abstractions
| on top of.
|
| I've been working with Kubernetes for the past 6 years.
| It's fine. It does its job. Let's all move on from the
| outrage.
| bachmeier wrote:
| If your goal is to put some code out there just to share it with
| others, any of those will work. There's also Bitbucket,
| Sourceforge, and self-hosted Fossil. The blog author seems to be
| looking for more of an "enterprise" open source option. You could
| even use Gitolite or GitWeb if you're willing to self-host.
| jzb wrote:
| Nothing says "unmaintained," or inertia, quite still like
| having a project hosted on Sourceforge. I'm sure there's a few
| exceptions that are thriving on Sourceforge, but... it's kind
| of a relic at this point. It'd be cool if it could have a
| revival, but I think they've tried that a few times and never
| quite got there. I certainly wouldn't put anything new there,
| myself.
| jmclnx wrote:
| I just went back to kind of "anonymous ftp" via my gemini site on
| sdf.org. I find it far easier to maintain. When I make a change,
| a script packages up the change and sends it to sdf.
|
| My github repositories were changed to point to it. The latest
| change by Microsoft made me move, I was considering a move when
| Copilot became a thing. 2FA got me off my butt to finally move.
| jckahn wrote:
| What about requiring 2FA made you leave?
| jjgreen wrote:
| Microsoft barking orders at you?
| jmclnx wrote:
| In my case I had to give them my cell phone, I have multiple
| platforms and no one M/S recommended solution would not work
| for all. I would not give MS my cell.
| toastal wrote:
| I've been moving into a self-hosted direction for a lot of my
| stuff as a lot of it really wasn't being used by anyone but
| myself anyhow. My latest two projects are darcs on my home server
| using just SSH+Nginx for HTTP with an apply hook that run `nix
| flake check` & on the server end, a hook that runs `nix build`
| which not only checks the build, but also has the derivation in
| Nix store for me to pick up later as that server doubles as a
| substitutor. Collaboration can still be done via email of patches
| or DMing a pull request from someone else's remote repo. It's
| crazy how much we've been defaulting to tools that are so
| complicated--especially ones that require accounts to participate
| & have a social media features tacked on everywhere to cause the
| sorts of social media anxiety it does everywhere else. When the
| amount of collaborators is low, self-hosting is hardly a barrier
| that needs extra scaling.
|
| Weird the author said email was a pain, but last patch I received
| it was as easy as `himalaya read --raw X | git am` to apply &
| pointing out that modern email clients do a bad job supporting
| this seems more damning of those clients than the workflow.
| misterio7 wrote:
| You might want to try out self hosting hydra! It's pretty sweet
| for your usecase (building and caching Nix stuff, in a smart
| way). It can even run arbitrary commands (e.g. moving a release
| branch)
|
| EDIT: here's how I do it, in case it's useful:
| https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-config/blob/a74b2ede/hosts...
| __float wrote:
| > Rather than needing a complicated YAML file to run a CI system,
| it's just cloning Git repos and running commands.
|
| How do you define what repos you need and which commands are run?
| Ah, it is indeed _also_ a YAML file:
| https://srht.site/automating-deployments
| ihattendorf wrote:
| But is it a _complicated_ YAML file?
| eviks wrote:
| it's also not "just cloning Git repos and running commands"
| rco8786 wrote:
| They never start that way, do they?
| IshKebab wrote:
| You don't have to make Gitlab/GitHub YAML files complicated
| if you don't want to. The "script" section can be just a call
| to a normal shell/Python/Typescript CI script. It's pretty
| widely known that you should keep as much stuff out of the
| YAML as possible, so you can run CI locally.
|
| That was definitely the most bullshit criticism in the
| article. Clearly not even something they actually care about
| because they settled on Drone CI which is configured in
| exactly the same way.
| ahepp wrote:
| > You don't have to make Gitlab/GitHub YAML files
| complicated if you don't want to. The "script" section can
| be just a call to a normal shell/Python/Typescript CI
| script.
|
| It took me an embarrassingly long time to learn that you
| don't _need_ to use their little action plugins for
| everything.
|
| Once I figured that out, and figured out how to run CI in a
| container specified by the repo, I was actually quite happy
| to transition my CI away from Jenkins (which was always
| pretty rough, but I knew I could keep the builds running
| locally that way).
|
| I guess the real proof will be if I'm able to ever leave
| GitHub, but I feel pretty good about the amount of lock-in
| vs the benefits of the service.
| tuukkah wrote:
| > _to run CI in a container specified by the repo_
|
| Would you happen to have an example YAML at hand?
| ahepp wrote:
| Here's one:
|
| https://github.com/ahepp/resume/blob/d7778b1339271cbd7812
| 634...
|
| It uses GitHub's devcontainer plugin. There's a
| devcontainer config at .devcontainer/devcontainer.json,
| which says to use the image specified by .ci/Dockerfile.
|
| So when I'm developing on any Linux system, I can run
| $ docker build .ci/Dockerfile -t my-container $
| docker run --rm -it -v $(pwd):/project -w /project my-
| container
|
| And have a shell with my LaTeX environment all ready to
| go.
|
| I can also create a GitHub codespace from the
| devcontainer config. I'm excited to explore more of the
| possibilities with devcontainers. I've included
| Dockerfiles with all my projects for quite a while now,
| it's cool to have some kind of standard written down that
| tooling can be written for.
|
| I think the GitHub YAML a slight improvement over the old
| Jenkins configs it replaced:
|
| https://github.com/ahepp/resume/commit/a144ee06b868ae867b
| 287...
|
| For one, there's no out-of-band Jenkins UI I need to
| configure the pipeline in. The syntax is probably a
| slight improvement over Jenkins. I'm also happy to use
| opaque plugins for certain things, like uploading to S3.
| tuukkah wrote:
| Thank you for sharing! This shows nicely how you can keep
| the GitHub YAML at minimum by referring to an action (in
| this case devcontainers/ci) which configures itself based
| on the content of the repo.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| On other CI systems it is also a good idea to only use the
| YAML file to call a bash/python/deno/... script which does
| the actual work.
| LoganDark wrote:
| I also checked out SourceHut, but they're unfortunately not
| compatible with my email provider, and after some discussion with
| Drew (the founder) it started to sound like I'm not welcome
| unless I bring a real legal name and human identity. I understand
| how that type of collaboration can be valued and desired, but it
| excludes me, so I didn't pursue SourceHut any further. Something
| to think about if you ever consider it - no pseudonyms, no custom
| emails, use your real name and personal email address, or you'll
| be actively rejected by their software.
| emersion wrote:
| SourceHut staff here. We don't have any requirement for "real
| legal" names or anything -- and in fact I find these
| requirements very harmful in general (glad we finally got rid
| of them in the kernel). I know multiple people collaborating on
| SourceHut with a pseudonym and this causes no issue at all.
| SourceHut does assume a stable email address but that's about
| it.
|
| That's my own take -- for Drew's see
| https://drewdevault.com/2023/10/31/On-real-names.html
| LoganDark wrote:
| It's not a requirement, but I heavily got the vibe that
| pseudonyms are not welcome. To quote Drew, "You should be
| using your real email address with the mailing lists, so that
| people can reach you and treat you as a human being, not as a
| proxy of one."
|
| I'm just not comfortable putting myself out there like that.
| I get it's not technically against the rules to do it
| differently, but it's just... frowned upon.
|
| Other justifications included that my peers would be sharing
| their real names and personal email addresses, so I'm being
| non-courteous by not doing the same... I dunno. It wasn't a
| particularly productive email chain, but it told me all I
| needed to know.
| morelisp wrote:
| Pseudonyms are fine, hapaxnyms are what's cautioned
| against. Given that you use "Logan Dark" in several places
| surely you recognize why this is useful?
| LoganDark wrote:
| What is a "hapaxnym"? I can't find a definition or even
| any results for this word online.
|
| And it's not "Logan Dark", it's "LoganDark".
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > What is a "hapaxnym"? I can't find a definition or even
| any results for this word online.
|
| A portmanteau word of "hapax legomenon"
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hapax_legomenon) and
| "pseudonym", i.e. a pseudonym that is used nowhere else.
| RealStickman_ wrote:
| I'm surprised the author rejected using GitLab because of its
| Open Core model, but decided foe using Drone CI, which appears to
| be following a similar model.
| steezeburger wrote:
| The whole article feels really inconsistent on what the author
| likes and dislikes and his reasonings behind such things.
| Really off putting article imo.
| pacbard wrote:
| If drone's open core is a problem, there is always woodpecker,
| which was forked from the original drone before they changed
| their license a few years ago.
| thih9 wrote:
| Open core was one of the reasons. Another was that it's also
| "AI-powered".
| revskill wrote:
| If the reasoning is "gitlab is bloated" then it's more
| reasonable to me.
| xondono wrote:
| What I understood is that the author is not happy about the
| "Open Core" model and would prefer truly OSS, but the real deal
| breaker is maintaining Gitlab.
|
| My experience self hosting Gitlab was pretty terrible, it
| requires a lot of attention on your part, and internally the
| project feels like a bunch of fragile scripts.
|
| There's also little documentation for when things go wrong,
| with was almost every single update.
|
| In the end I switched to Gitea as well and I've been happy with
| it for years at this point.
| tandav wrote:
| I found it difficult to find documentation on how to run
| gitlab in docker without nginx (I use caddy for reverse
| proxy) and enable the registry. For anyone having the same
| problem, here's a working Dockerfile.
| https://gitlab.tandav.me/tandav/notes/-/issues/5516
|
| I've tried github actions, drone, woodpecker and gitlab. In
| my opinion gitlab has a much more flexible CI system.
| cevn wrote:
| I was searching everywhere for this 3 months ago, then
| switched to forgejo lol. Good tip though.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| I've been running the GitLab Omnibus for 4 years now. Easiest
| upgrades ever. Never once had a bad update that required
| manual workarounds.
| Xiol32 wrote:
| We run a self-hosted Gitlab Premium instance installed with
| Omnibus for 30 devs and we actually install Gitlab updates
| on a cron.
|
| Had two upgrades that needed minor manual intervention in 5
| years. Uptime better than Github despite the #yolo
| approach.
| eviks wrote:
| > the email-based workflow was a lot clunkier than I expected
|
| > If you want to create a repo for PR's sake, email me at dev at
| notgull dot net and I can set you up.
|
| So is there no way to allow seamless forking like on GitHub
| without high risks of abuse?
| huijzer wrote:
| You can nowadays use the built-in CI instead of Drone. It's
| experimental but has worked fine for me so far.
| confd wrote:
| It's a wonder how much freedom can be gained by eschewing the
| desire to be discovered.
| thih9 wrote:
| The author didn't eschew discovery - the article mentions
| mirroring to github to take advantage of their code discovery.
| confd wrote:
| And what do you think of that?
| thih9 wrote:
| At first I thought it was pointless, i.e. to migrate from
| github only to mirror your code there eventually.
|
| But in the end I like it -- mirroring self hosted source
| forges to github seems a good way to raise awareness of
| github alternatives.
| thih9 wrote:
| Given the rise of "AI-powered" forges, i.e. platforms that add
| the source of projects hosted there to their AI models, is it ok
| to upload GPL-licensed code there?
| IshKebab wrote:
| This seems pretty filled with arbitrary back-reasoning for
| decisions they've already made based on guy feelings.
|
| They don't like "AI-powered" because it is a vague, ill-defined
| term... except it's extremely obvious and well defined what
| GitHub means by that (and they've even used copilot and liked
| it!)
|
| Gitlab CI is rejected because it uses YAML for config... like
| every other CI system they mention.
|
| Gitlab isn't ok because it's open core, but Drone CI is.
|
| Could have been an interesting comparison but it wasn't.
| dartos wrote:
| Onedev is pretty good. I run it locally and it's been grwat
| jamesu wrote:
| Onedev has pretty good features built-in. They even seem to
| have a paid option now too which adds some additional features,
| though I wonder what the division between paid and unpaid
| features will look like as the project ages. To be fair though,
| there only seems to be one person consistently working on it.
|
| Also there is just something about its sidebar-centric UI I
| just don't like. It's not as bad as gitlab but still, it bugs
| me every time I use it.
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| Is Microsoft secretly learning from the secrets in private GitHub
| repositories?
| bionhoward wrote:
| No, but Microsoft has an AI term of service which forbids use
| of Microsoft AI for AI development.
|
| """ AI Services q. AI Services. "AI services" are services that
| are labeled or described by Microsoft as including, using,
| powered by, or being an Artificial Intelligence ("AI") system.
|
| iii. Limits on use of data from the AI Services. You may not
| use the AI services, or data from the AI services, to create,
| train, or improve (directly or indirectly) any other AI
| service.
|
| """
|
| If you ask GitHub Copilot Chat about the issue, it/they suggest
| seeking professional legal advice. To use GitHub Copilot. An AI
| trained on our AI code from GitHub. To write AI code. For
| paying customers.
|
| https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DIj6-mgyxVRBJNEeVZMV8t8ec2L...
|
| Satya Nadella is King Midas. I emailed him and their legal team
| about it many times and he could have personally gone into the
| codebase and deleted this service term by now. I reported them
| to the State of Washington Attorney General (you can, too), and
| to the Federal Trade Commission Antitrust Team (you can, too),
| and to the Department of Justice Antitrust Enforcement Division
| (you can, too). Unclear how to report this to the EU Parliament
| AI Act folks, but maybe they posted new info since I last
| checked.
|
| It's a single line of text, certainly unfair and unreasonable
| and almost surely illegal in pretty much every relevant
| jurisdiction, so there's certainly no an argument to be made
| that the fix is too technically challenging, even in light of
| Microsoft's historical ineptitude.
|
| We could check to see if Washington State has laws against
| contractual restraint of trade like California does. (Hint,
| Hint.)
| sneak wrote:
| He doesn't want to use GitHub because it trains Copilot on f/oss
| code, but then selfhosts and mirrors all his code to GitHub
| anyway?
|
| Why release free software if you don't want others to use it?
|
| Why provide any code to GitHub if you don't want GitHub to use
| it?
|
| This is just tribalism, the ideology isn't even consistent.
| godber wrote:
| I've kind of anticipated this sentiment and have been thinking
| about providing Gitea hosting. Though I've been a little
| discouraged by Gitea's release of their own cloud hosting
| service.
|
| This blog post and the revenue growth at Gitlab over the last two
| quarters appear to be evidence of people wanting to moving away
| from GitHub (though their earnings report attribute the growth to
| other initiatives, clearly I had no real insight on this). As an
| extension of my self hosting of Mastodon efforts from last year I
| rolled up my other minor hosting efforts into https://hawt.cloud
| as a place to experiment with providing services like this.
|
| This all ties in with the "Open Web" or "Small Web" sentiments
| I've seen expressed recently. The hyperscalers are locking more
| and more up into their ecosystems but there should still exist
| small vendors/hosting/service providers. They'll never scale or
| be as reliable as the big guys but if they cease to exist a lot
| will be lost.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > I hope they haven't started down the slow and painful process
| of enshittification by following vague, ill-defined industry
| trends!
|
| Has anyone else found themselves wondering if GitHub switched to
| a different web framework?
|
| I feel like they moved further down the client-side rendering
| rabbit hole recently. Their UI feels increasingly janky to me.
| Several times a day I get a view of completely un-styled HTML
| that eventually organizes itself into the appropriate
| presentation.
|
| For many scenarios, the GH web UI used to be preferable over
| navigating through visual studio because of how responsive it
| was. Now, I find the exact opposite to be true. I avoid the GH
| web UI as much as possible. VS2022 isn't great, but at least it's
| not implemented using react on top of some bullshit chrome
| wrapper.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| Yeah, it's React. It's been a pretty frequent topic of
| discussion in some corners of the fediverse lately, e.g.
| https://mastodon.social/@bendelarre/111585575314778379
| bob1029 wrote:
| Thank you for the link. I've been trying to find any
| discussion whatsoever. This commentary inspired me to submit
| a support issue.
|
| I intend to start some drama with GH over this. ReactJS
| _will_ win if we do nothing.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| Here's another, older thread, including some inside
| perspective:
| https://toot.cafe/@slightlyoff/111390409414137820
| lucideer wrote:
| This post bothered me.
|
| Perhaps I'm being too nitpicky, and there's nothing inherently
| wrong with their final choices, but their criticisms of the other
| systems alongside their reasons for choosing what they did are
| contradictory; overall the article was internally inconsistent.
|
| Gitlab was dismissed for the SaaS being only open-core, despite
| opting for self-hosting in the end. Codeberg was dismissed for
| having limited CI, but in the end they went for a separate
| standalone CI anyway (& almost the same platform as Codeberg,
| just with the added overhead of self-hosting).
| philipov wrote:
| Open-core was mentioned, but was not a dealbreaker. Gitlab was
| dismissed for just following along with what GitHub does and
| being "AI-powered"
| Tadpole9181 wrote:
| No, the parent is right. The very first two reasons given
| were being open-field and that they "didn't wasn't to be a
| sysadmin".
| dabedee wrote:
| Yes, they dismissed Gitlab in part because of the self-hosted
| argument: "I know I can download GitLab and set it up on my own
| server. However, I'm a software developer, not a sysadmin. I
| want to spend my time developing software, not putting out
| fires and paying AWS bills for the rest of time."
|
| Yet they ended up choosing a self-hosted option, Gitea, because
| it was recommended by an acquaintance and they set up a couple
| lightsail servers on AWS to run it.
|
| It's totally fine for the author to share their preferences;
| they're just exhibiting the internal inconsistencies and
| irrational behavior we're probably all guilty of at one point
| or another.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| To be honest gitlab can be a very painful beast to maintain if
| you just want to use it for yourself, especially if it's
| exposed to the public internet. The update rate is a bit
| insane, and while the updates are usually easy you still end up
| having to update almost every week or so, and I think monthly
| for critical security updates.
| lloeki wrote:
| I really wish a cross site standard emerged to enable PRs from
| one forge to the next without creating accounts:
|
| - clone repo from original forge, push on yours
|
| - open PR on your forge, kicking in a like-blog-trackbacks-of-
| yore API so that the PR would be known/opened on the original
| forge.
|
| The thing would really put the "Pull Request" back in PR.
|
| Lots of things to define and handle correctly to prevent abuse
| but it could be a much better distributed experience.
|
| I guess big players like GitHub would nit like that too much
| though as it would fragment their coding social network.
| erlend_sh wrote:
| That's what ActivityPub in GitLab and elsewhere aims to enable:
| https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/11247
| nirga wrote:
| It's hard to build a community around an open source if you're
| not on GitHub imo. And if you're not building an open source,
| than iiuc GitHub can't use your code for copilot training so the
| main reason for not choosing GitHub according to the post isn't
| relevant.
| rapnie wrote:
| https://ayllu-forge.org/
|
| > Hyper Performant & Hackable Code Forge Built on Open Standards.
| Ayllu is a lightweight code forge designed to enable individuals
| and community projects to develop software in collaboration
| across open internet standards.
| tshirttime wrote:
| There's gitawonk.com, a gitea instance that lets you charge
| people for your commit history.
| easterncalculus wrote:
| One of the things that people should know about SourceHut is that
| even though it is "Free Software", it is not a very "free"
| platform. Certain types of projects are a red line to the owner
| and will be removed[0].
|
| I'll be honest, I do not trust cryptocurrency stuff and don't
| believe that it has utility. I hold none, I don't use it. That
| being said, this makes me wonder what the next category of
| projects that SourceHut will ban is.
|
| What is the point of a free software forge if you can't host
| certain types of (legal) projects? It's hard to take a platform
| seriously, to move all of your work there when the administrators
| can (and most importantly, actually do) ban your projects based
| solely on their personal views.
|
| [0]: https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-31-tos-update-
| cryptocurre...
| apitman wrote:
| This comes up over and over on different platforms. It's sad to
| me how many services that are built on open source software
| don't allow you to use a custom domain. It's not that hard.
| Let's Encrypt makes it almost trivial.
| rodlette wrote:
| +1. I moved from Sourcehut when it announced IRS change of TOS.
| I realised I would prefer to support less discriminatory
| forges.
|
| I also have no interest in crytocurrency.
| apitman wrote:
| > Let me be clear, GitHub is still far and away the best website
| for open source discover
|
| We need to separate discovery from hosting across the web. It's
| convenient to implement them together, but certainly not
| necessary. Bring back the link aggregators!
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| This is one of the first times I've seen someone who has casual
| access to Kubernetes.
|
| They spent a lot of the post saying how they didn't really want
| to run stuff,
|
| > _However, I'm a software developer, not a sysadmin. I want to
| spend my time developing software, not putting out fires and
| paying AWS bills for the rest of time._
|
| But then their friend convinced them to "kubectl apply" a couple
| of manifests & they got a bunch of stuff spin up quickly, on what
| should be a reliable-ish maintained-by-other-people cluster. This
| is the first time I've seen a win like this & it feels like such
| a sweet spot!
| flohofwoe wrote:
| The author is too quick to dismiss Gitlab IMHO. I use Gitlab on
| the job, and Github for my hobby stuff, and Gitlab feels in many
| ways like a Github for professional use. The Gitlab CI system
| alone is a difference like night and day compared to GH Actions.
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