Microsoft is Locking Down Search for Public Code on GitHub : tech

[–] [email protected] 29 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Yeah, I'm not sure what this article is even trying to say; this has been happening for a while now.

Like, it's shitty, but it's not even the shittiest thing Github has done. I'm more annoyed about the whole AI stuff, the fact that they have de-facto veto powers on most open source projects and that they don't let you have multiple accounts to separate your professional life from your cringe life.

Modern times are really "people should get off of X platform but don't because people don't want to move".

[+] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (2 children)

https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-of-service#3-account-requirements

Here, I'm afraid. Third bullet. Whether or not they enforce it is another matter.

Sucks because I kinda might want to contribute some things to projects that I don't want people to know professionally.

Or maybe I can just make my profile private and hope nobody goes looking too hard.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

They...have an "add account" feature right in their UI though. They are obviously okay with multiple accounts. Perhaps it is an abuse thing like if they notice you sock puppeting or something.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

That's for if you have a personal account and one provided by your company.

In some cases, you may need to use multiple accounts on GitHub.com. For example, you may have a personal account for open source contributions, and your employer may also create and manage a user account for you within an enterprise.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I’m not sure where they have their information from, I have 2 very unique, personal accounts on github and i’ve had zero issues.

first is my public “portfolio” page and occasional professional/corporate client connected account, it is very much an account that you would “know” my info, linkedin, keybase, etc identifiers. Then i have a personal one that I use to contribute more anonymously, which I use to further opensource projects that my clients wouldn’t want me contributing to due to conflict of interest. I’m not talking espionage levels, just modified supportive code that i have contributed to an enterprise that doesn’t support opensource initiatives (aka, they’d pay a fine if it ever came public).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Modern times are really “people should get off of X platform but don’t because people don’t want to move”.

More like "people should get off of X platform but don't because people they regularly interact with don't want to move, and because herd mentality"

It's the same reason why people tolerate YouTube's bullshit. The audience won't switch to a platform without content, and the content creators won't switch to a platform without an audience.

[–] AphoticDev 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

What do you mean they don't let you have multiple accounts? I've had three accounts for years, and I'm not doing anything to hide the fact they're all me.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

That's more likely to target farming, like 1 person with 1000 accounts that are used as bots. At least I hope so.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

(in other news it appears i have inadvertently discovered that the lemmy dialect of markdown supports {ruby|text})

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago (1 children)

in other news it appears i have inadvertently discovered that the lemmy dialect of markdown supports {ruby|text}

It looks like you had a stroke reading from Kbin

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

Here’s how it should look (I think)

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Companies are putting moats around their data (or the data they host) because AI needs data to train its models on. It is the same reason Reddit changed their API access.

I'll even wager 20 imaginary internet coins that Wikipedia will require logins to do any searching within the next year.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 years ago

I’ll even wager 20 imaginary internet coins that Wikipedia will require logins to do any searching within the next year.

I'll take that bet. Being a community-driven non-profit, Wikipedia is different.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I don't buy that as the reddit reason for their API change.

For a group that wants to feed AI models, web scraping reddit is barely a speed bump compared to having a nice API to use.

Reddit did what it did to force users onto their mobile app so they could better harvest user data and keep them from avoiding ads.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This made me go check on OpenRed, a reddit app for iOS that didn’t use the API (a more than likely no-no - scraping the site, essentially).

Not only is it missing from the App Store, but the dev and his subreddit were both banned.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

It’s crazy how long Reddit was such a huge part of my life and then just like that, doesn’t exist.

The only thing I miss are the videos.

Videos don’t get traction here it seems.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

In this case I don't think that's the reason. All code on github is not Microsoft's data, is open source and easily downloadable by whoever needs it to train the models.

This is an inconvenience only for humans to force them to have an account

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Wow, I was not aware of this. That's a pretty big reason why I make my stuff open-source, so others can look through it and learn from it. I know, everyone who stayed on GitHub is officially Microsoft's bitch now, but I still can't fathom why this didn't make bigger waves...

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Probably because like you I wasn't aware of what Microsoft was up to. Let's just hope embrace extend extinguish doesn't end up with a GitHub version of git.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

They do already have GitHub Desktop, for Windows and macOS...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

In fairness though that's just a UI for git in the same vein as things like GitKraken or GitCola atm if I'm not mistaken

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

That is my understanding of it, too, yeah. In principle, I'm also okay with them providing something like this. I'm just worried that they'll eventually start adding stuff into it, which impacts Git.

[+] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

And "little while" is, I think, at least a year. If not more.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Is Codeberg a good alternative if I'm gonna have my dotfiles (public) and some open-source software?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

Heard only good things about Codeberg, I've only used it to access code so can't really speak to anything else.

Was recently made aware of this new part;
"Brought to you by an inclusive community under the umbrella of Codeberg e.V., a democratic non-profit organization, Forgejo can be trusted to be exclusively Free Software."

https://forgejo.org/

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