GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

Re:GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you by jeroenhd on Saturday July 03, 2021 @04:37PM (#27724697)

Open source code still has a license. That license may or may not require distributing the license along with the code. MIT may allow distribution without a license unless the code share is significant, but reusing GPL3 is a no-go for commercial companies.

The Apache 2 license allows for commercial use, but has implications for the way you can enforce your software patents. It also requires distributing the license file along with your application.

Complaining that companies use the software you told the world was free to use without restriction is dumb. However, not everyone gives away their software for free without restrictions. The fact that Github isn't respecting those licenses is a much bigger problem.

The tool autocompleting some random guy's personal information because he uploaded his blog to Github is highly problematic. The idea of using permissively licensed code to train an AI is not bad, but some human with knowledge of software licenses would need to pre-select those projects.

If all code came from one of those "do whatever the fuck you want" licenses, then there wouldn't be a problem. I'd consider it to be a great product and have no issue paying a fee. There's a huge market for a Copilot product, but this iteration just.. isn't it.

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Re:GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you by jefftk on Saturday July 03, 2021 @05:48PM (#27725203)

> reusing GPL3 is a no-go for commercial companies

The GPL is completely compatible with commercial use. You just need to share modifications to the source with anyone you share the binary with. Many tech companies make extensive use of GPL software, and since they are not providing binaries to their end users they don't even have to share their changes to the source.

Even the AGPL, which does require you to share the source with users, still completely allows commercial use (though not compatible with as many business models).

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Re:GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you by jeroenhd on Saturday July 03, 2021 @07:11PM (#27725773)

If you include GPL3 code, your code also effectively also becomes GPL3 licensed. This isn't a problem for companies producing GPL3 software, of course, but most companies keep their source code to themselves.

True, the web loophole is a way around this, assuming the GPL'd code isn't part of the compiled/minified/integrated frontend Javascript libraries that gets sent to the client (because then you have the exact same problem).

It's not that commercial use is prohibited by GPL3, it's more that most businesses do not want to risk accidentally releasing a version of their software that requires them to share all source code to that version. And even if you're producing open source software, GPL3 might still be a problem because of incompatible licenses (see ZFS for an example) if you don't own _all_ the copyright so you can dual-license your software.

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