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
Yeah I figured as much. It was mostly a joke. At the end of the day, if stuff is on GH, people can take it. It’s barely even stealing. Unless the license disagrees of course but then you were putting a lot of trust in society by making it public in the first place.
That’s what I don’t get about this. Why does anyone care? Even this Chinese company, why do they care to clone it all? It’s already all hosted and publicly available.
Apparently they aren’t respecting licenses. It’s possible to have source code publicly available on GH but have it not be truly FOSS. But that’s generally not a great idea since you’re effectively relying on the honour system for people not to take your code.
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??
I complain all the time. But that’s not the subject of this post…
Yeah exactly, fuck llms that don’t honor licenses
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?
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.
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.
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
I’m not getting it. Explain, please?
IP Man. Great movies.
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
Not like I’d want contributions from the chinese state programmers.
Feels like an easy entry for state level supply chain attack.Who says they aren’t trying right now? I recall SSH had an attempt quite recently, I can guarantee that China is trying hard to include anything to out in back doors
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
Preparation for war.
