GitCode, a git-hosting website operated Chongqing Open-Source Co-Creation Technology Co Ltd and with technical support from CSDN and Huawei Cloud.
It is being reported that many users’ repository are being cloned and re-hosted on GitCode without explicit authorization.
There is also a thread on Ycombinator (archived link)
Solution: create a GitHub repo with Markdown articles outlining human rights abuses by the CCP and have a large number of GitHub users star and fork the repo.
You’ve heard of CamelCase and lowercase and intVariableName variable naming styles. Get ready for:
for (int Taiwan == 0; Taiwan < HongKong; Taiwan++) { int TianamenSquare == 0; … }
That’s the whole point of this: they will automatically filter that out, and this is an impotent, though well intended, gesture.
How will they filter it out? If they just don’t mirror anything with ‘forbidden’ terms, we can poison repos to prevent them being mirrored. If they try to tamper with the repo histories then they’ll end up breaking a load of stuff that relies on consistent git hashes.
I feel like the effort to make such a repo and make it popular enough to be cloned and rehosted is a lot more effort than someone manually checking the results of an automated filter process.
The “effort economy” is hugely in favor of the mirroring side
The vast majority of projects on GitHub is open-source and forkable, why would that need authorization?
It’s… suspicious that China’s doing it en masse, but there’s nothing wrong in cloning or forking a repo last i heard.
It’s not about authorization. They want to build a knowledge base for when the Great Firewall gets some more filters. Just like russias mirror of wikipedia which is heavily edited to discredit the west.
This seems like the most plausible explanation. Only other thing I can think of is they want to develop their own CoPilot (which I’m guessing isn’t available in China due to the U.S. AI restrictions?), and they’re just using their existing infrastructure to gather training data.
Just like russias mirror of wikipedia which is heavily edited to discredit the west.
How come I live in Russia and have never seen such?
I know only of quite a few troll\counterculture projects, some, like Lurkmore, are already, well, dead, some, like Traditsiya, are not.
That, of course, if you don’t mean that Russian Wikipedia in itself has problems. Which would be true.
With the obligatory “fuck everyone who disregards open source licenses”, I am still slightly amused at this raising eyebrows while nearly no one is complaining about MS using github to train their copilot LLM, which will help circumvent licenses & copyrights by the bazillion.
nearly no one is complaining about MS using github to train their copilot LLM
What rock have you been living under??
while nearly no one is complaining about MS using github to train their copilot LLM,
Lots of people complained about that. I’ve only seen this single thread complaining about this.
I complain all the time. But that’s not the subject of this post…
Yeah exactly, fuck llms that don’t honor licenses
Came here to say this. As much as I don’t like china, there is really nothing to see (apart from the source, that’s for everybody to see).
This could be illegal for git repos that do not have a open source license that allows mirroring or copying (BSD, Apache, Mit, GPL, etc.) Sometimes these repos are more “source available” and the source is only allowed to be read, not redistributed or modified. I would say that this is more of a matter for each individual copyright holder, not Microsoft.
But ultimately I agree, this really isn’t as big of a deal as people are making.
edit: changed some wording to be clearer
If I look at a few implementations of an algorithm and then implement my own using those as inspiration, am I breaking copyright law and circumventing licenses?
This is inevitable:
Once the people in China can only see the CCP’s version of everything,
& ALL stuff has been adulterated, either by AI or by some agency-or-other,
THEN dissent should die-down in the Chinese population:
Read Lanier’s “Foreign to Familiar” to understand how Tropical-Culture vs Nordic-Culture shapes people, & how old-cultures vs new-cultures shape people,
then read Hofstede’s “Exploring Culture” to understand the dimensions of culture that his Cultural Dimensions Theory digs into ( power-distance, uncertainty-avoidance, “success”-orientation, & other dimensions )…
& when you understand how we’re kind of “template” people, before being born into culture,
but once born into it, our entire meaning gets framed within whatever culture we were born into…
therefore, the CCP can simply remove most diversity-of-meaning from their completely-possessed-population, through a generation or 2 of that.
Tibetan, Uyghur, Hongkonger, Taiwanese, Indian, South-Korean, Japanese, the intent is consistent: "the destruction of " … others … “is the midwife of Chinese supremacy”.
I expect a similar kind of program to exist in all right-possessed countries, as the right is doing in the US, right now, with burning or banning books, eradicating proper education, suppressing libraries, etc, they’re just doing the same thing as what the CCP’s doing, only less-skillfully, is all.
No real difference in their deeper heart/motivation/intent, though: supremacism, crushing/destroying all “other” kinds.
Russia’s big on it, too, isn’t it?
Islamism…
The “Crusades” were good examples of this kind of idiocy?
The “Inquisition”?
The “Buddhist” genociding of Tamils?
So long as the “home” story is … “coherent”, & “justifies” all, then … kids grow up … believing, right?
There’s a book, & a Big Think yt video, on “Collective Illusions”, which is important!
Please invest in seeing that video, & see how it’s actually a delusion-mechanism in our minds…
…used by political-forces, yes, but they couldn’t use it if it didn’t exist, could they?
_ /\ _
Yeah… The main thing I see here is that China (read; government , not the people, not being racist here) will take this code, they will make improvements on it, they will NOT give back. Basically like Microsoft, but now an entire country.
Chinese government hasn’t exact had a good reputation when it comes to taking technology and not giving anything back
It is not illegal is it?
If it is legal, then thank you China for the free backup.
I do believe it’s illegal if they take a repository with a restrictive license (which includes any repository without a license), and then make it available on their own service. I think China just doesn’t care.
If we steal IP from China does the American government give us a business loan?
China has no IP
I love how this image is a pun
China cares of nothing, from patents to licences. Culture of steal and copy, rebrand and sell/use
I would argue that this culture would possibly be good to learn from them, first. It didn’t come to existence as some kind of social evolution, but was impressed by power.
Second, at least they are behind Europeans in the culture of genocide.
Learn from stealing ane copying ? Meh.
Second is completely unrelated (but also false btw)
Learn from stealing ane copying ? Meh.
Learn some respect, first of all, - China has had quite a few developmental achievements historically.
Learn that intellectual property is a less certain case than material property. Especially intellectual property in cases where there’s only one way to do something.
Learn that if you steal and copy well enough, you can dominate or replace those you steal and copy from. Say, Spanish is not the dominant language on this planet, because the rest of Europe was stealing and copying well enough. Say, western Roman Empire ended, because peoples under its influence were stealing and copying well enough to go on without such a hegemon.
Learn that there’s no end of history and sometimes you have to be more cunning.
Learn that you are stupid and if you don’t know how to do things right, find the way to do them somehow, it’s better than nothing.
A lot of things.
Second is completely unrelated
Well, it’s related in my PoV.
(but also false btw)
We are discussing this in English, mostly American English at that.
fun to think that my shitty program is now stored in an artic vault and stored in some Chinese servers
So many bugs I never fixed and yet here we are lol
If it’s a public repo do they need permission?
Not saying this is good, but you can’t really argue that it’s not a natural consequence of open source.
I’m noticing this misconception in a lot of places.
Just because something is on GitHub, doesn’t mean it’s open source.
If it’s on the internet, I save, I pirate, I protect. Don’t like it ? Then get off MY internet !
It’s a bit odd, but isn’t it equivalent to forking and putting up a fork elsewhere?
I guess I don’t see the problem.
It will be funny to see folks who spent the last ten years posting “It’s not stealing, it’s copying” memes suddenly find religion because Evil Foreign People got involved.
I’m quite scared of how AI apparently pushes people in favour of significantly stricter copyrights. This is not a good trend.
I don’t understand why this is a bad thing? Open source code is designed to be shared/distributed, and an open-source license can’t place any limits on who can use or share the code. Git was designed as a distributed, decentralized model partly for this reason (even though people ended up centralizing it on Github anyways)
They might end up using the code in a way that violates its license, but simply cloning it isn’t a problem.
I personally don’t care if someone “steals” my code (Here’s my profile if you want to do so: https://github.com/ZILtoid1991 ), however it can mean some mixture of two things:
- China is getting ready for war, which will mean the US will try its best to block technology, including open source projects.
- China is planning to block GitHub due to it being able to host information the Chinese government might not like.
Of course it could mean totally unrelated stuff too (e.g. just your typical anti-China and/or anti-communist paranoia sells political points).
Isn’t GitHub already blocked in China?
It is
They should definitely respect the licenses, that being said, Microsoft owns GitHub and can be a bit quick in what they ban. It also means they are beholden to US laws, which could turn anti FOSS-AI in the near future.
This is a smart move and I honestly hope more countries start doing it. It would probably lead to a better ecosystem.
I think projects like this are good, but I really don’t want governments to create their own version of XYZ for the sake of creating clones of XYZ. I’m scared that all this will do is fragment an almost-universal collection of open-source projects into regional variants for no real reason.
“Governments” arent doing this. Its some company
