How to bypass GPL (easy tutorial)

lemmur@szmer.info to Open Source@lemmy.ml – 249 points –
  1. Be a huge company
  2. Buy one of the biggest FOSS hosting websites
  3. Train AI model on code from your purchase
  4. Paywall and restrict access to the model for everyone except you
  5. Laught at Stallman and his lifework
  6. Profit
30

Let's be honest this is how it actually usually plays out:

  1. Be a huge company

  2. Make your employees sign an NDA

  3. Make your code closed source

  4. Use GPL code and not give a shit because you're a huge company with a legal team bigger than your Dev team

7 - AI generate code has no copyright

8 - Windows is now public domain

9 - Insert despicable me meme

Well, time to migrate to codeberg

Tell me more

Codeberg is a collaboration platform providing Git hosting and services for free and open source software, content and projects. Codeberg is maintained by the non-profit organization Codeberg e.V., based in Berlin, Germany. For them, supporting the commons comes first. They are more than just Git hosting: their community is comprised of like-minded developers, artists, academics, hobbyists and professionals. No tracking. No third-party cookies. No profiteering. Everything runs on servers that they control. Your data is not for sale.

They also are working towards creating federated instances, by extending ActivityPub!

Codeberg is an organization that provides a Gitea instance for public use. I think their ToS only allows using their service for free software projects, but you should check that before doing anything with this info.

Gitea is an open source code forge. It is very similar to Github, both by the looks, and because it uses a build automation system (almost?) totally compatible with Github actions. It also has a quite unique feature, repo migrations, that can periodically "import" the git repo, and platform specific things like issues, MRs, releases and such too but only on the initial migration currently. Some use the periodic part for archiving git repos from elsewhere that they have found useful.

Note: Gitea owners decided to give a f..k about free software, so the community-based fork is now Forgejo.

While I've been considering the switch, for anyone newly reading this, there is bias. Gitea claims the company they formed will not build enterprise-only features, and exist solely to charge for support contracts. In nearly a year since, this has been true, and Forgeja appears to be a soft fork unless that changes. Plenty of open source companies exist, you may even be posting from one.

Oh fine then. So, just like Micro$oft VSCode and Codium.

I am posting from open-source software built by nonprofit organizations, like Mozilla Firefox. The Linux Kernel seems also to be developed by a legal entity. So, maybe it also counts?

P. S. And yeah, I'm using a distro made by a for-profit company (that one with an X logo but not that one)

So you are on MX Linux?

Nope, Tuxedo's stock OS that is based on Kubuntu but without snaps

You stating "for-profit company" should have been a hint that I could not possibly have beeen correct. I should read better. 😆

Wait is Github enshittifying already? I thought that was on next year's schedule?

GitHub has began enshittifying since the launch of GitHub Copilot.

That doesn't bypass anything. Though it runs the risk of putting AGPL code in your proprietary app if copilot decides to copy it verbatim - thereby making the whole thing AGPL'd.

Ok, now enforce it. There’s plenty of examples of corps violating software licenses and nothing happens bc a open source project doesn’t have the resources to fight a mega-corp.

No. To bypass GPL you have to be a big company, not respect the GPL (not respecting the law is called risk management) and gain more than what you would owe if someone sues you

Wouldn't AGPL fight that?

Not until somebody challenges it in court and wins...

A bit out of the loop here, anyone mind giving me a tl;dr ?

Github Copilot.

Context:

GitHub CoPilot is a code-writing AI that had been trained on the projects hosted on GitHub.

The code CoPilot has written is derived from open source projects including GPL ones, however it does not require users to abide by these licenses, thus opening up potential for litigation as it technically infringes on GPL license of the code CoPilot was trained on.