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)
China cares of nothing, from patents to licences. Culture of steal and copy, rebrand and sell/use
that could come in veery handy once microsoft wants to pull some plugs. i guess we can be grateful for the backup that is 1. not 100% in m$ hands any more then and 2nd cannot be as easy destroyed as some backups at archive.org. i actually hoped for someone with enough money to create this type of security after m$ assimilated github and thought like “does nobody see the rising danger there?” but even if china’s great fork might be more reliable than m$ over time, maybe it’s better to have your own backups of all the things you actually may need in future.
btw did microsoft manage to get rid of the hackers that settled into their network for … how long??
i guess they’ll tell
If we steal IP from China does the America government give us a business loan?
China has no IP
Bs
I love how this image is a pun
I’m not getting it. Explain, please?
God damn it, Jiaan Yang!
I call my uncle, he’s very corrupt
New New Internet.
Smart.
I hate authoritarian regimes, but why hosting cloned repos is bad?
EDIT: https://lemmy.world/comment/10853810
It appears to be scam-type(capitalism with beastly grin type) mirror. Not saying that hosting mirrors is bad in itself.
It is not illegal is it?
If it is legal, then thank you China for the free backup.
Law do not exist by itself; it’s the result of balance of power. How would you know that your State do not use illegally free software ? And if you know it, could you sue it ? Even if it’s a classified administration ?
Apply laws Internationally is even worse. It usually depends of the imperialist relationship between States. For exemple, Facebook rules was illegal in France, but France changes it’s laws rather than sue Facebook. A decade later, the whole European Union could forte RGPD upon the GAFAM.
China have nothing to fear in ignoring those licence, and we shouldn’t rely on it to protect our work. However we could strengthen our common defenses, through FOSS for people in the US … and maybe trade unions elsewhere.
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.
You can buy pirated software or pre-cracked consoles in stores there. They don’t care.
Illegal according to who?
The US? Why would China care, they are their own country with their own laws.
International courts? Who is enforcing those judgments?
Classic Chinese tech co, if you can’t create something on your own just download the source files and say you made it. The money spends the same after the fact, anyhow.
GitHub are not some bastion of righteousness - they are literally owned by Microsoft. And they work hard to stop people from getting too much Open Source from them, with rate limits and the like, so essentially gate keep.
I think CSDN probably want to gatekeep their clone even harder, but in general having archives of GitHub on the Internet is a good thing.
Yes. Fuck CCP, but having mirror is good.
EDIT: https://lemmy.world/comment/10853810
It appears to be scam-type(capitalism with beastly grin type) mirror.
I’m surprised this wasnt done already
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 !
I get what your saying, in that open source projects normally have a licence that applies to how it’s used - but this has always been open to abuse.
Nothing has ever stopped things like this happening - see how industry has taken advantage of open source for decades (often productising things as their own in the process).
The industry takes advantage of open source projects that have permissive licenses. This is an important distinction.
If you didn’t release your code with a permissive license (or even with a license at all), you have rights that protect you and your code. The only issue is that copyright infringement can often be hard to prove if you didn’t plan ahead for it.
Depends on the license I suppose.
All major licenses allow it. GPL-family, BSD-family, MIT/X11, CC-family. Anything FSF-approved or OSI-approved.
Most projects on GitHub don’t have a license, which means it’s not allowed.
Great! Now I know who to contact when I accidentally delete all the plaintext API keys and passwords I had stored in a public github repo.
Apart from the dozens of scrape bots that already stole them?
You’re supposed to revoke API keys that are leaked. Not try to “unleak” them
I hope they copy the web interface too. I stopped using GitHub for my dumb little projects when Microsoft bought them and I can’t be bothered to learn git. I will gladly host my future projects there if it’s good.
I can’t be bothered to learn git.
How to become unemployable as an engineer 101.
What use is Github / a Github clone to you without knowing git?
I think the major issue is here is that they are “mirroring” with the same username without clear indicating they are mirrors and they are modifying all the github links in Readme to GitCode. But if you want to claim your project, they want to only comment using the issue section of a project which requires account; but then you have to have a Chinese phone number to register account, and you will automatically get a Huawei Cloud account when you registering it
- All code provided there requires “coins” to download, even they are open-sourced code; it was reported multiple people in China got scammed via CSDN;
- You have to login to copy code on the post, and sometimes hides half the post to require you to login to read.
Oh fuck! Capitalism with beastly grin strikes back.
And I was just asking yesterday what would you feel if someone evil used your FOSS software: https://lemmy.world/post/16898871
