Take another look at this blog's index https://kingy.ai/category/blog/ and click through more posts, and pay attention to the post dates.
Do you really think this singular author is writing multiple excessively-long blog posts about AI per day? There are ~650 of these posts over the past 18 months. And over on LinkedIn, the author describes himself as a "Specialist in Digital Marketing, Videography / Video Editing, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, and B2B Sales."
YMMV but this post and entire site absolutely screams "slop" to me.
Reading means downloading. Downloading is equivalent to making a copy. To make a copy of a copyrighted work, you need a license, unless your activity is fair use. Licenses have terms and conditions that must be followed, such as retaining attribution in all derivative works.
That said, FOSS licenses are non-exclusive. Regarding the original upthread topic of GitHub's copilot training, iirc GitHub's terms and conditions involve granting them a license in order to host your code. Depending what else is in those terms, they may have had the ability to use all hosted code for LLM training through that license, instead of the FOSS licensing on any given Open Source repo. But that would only apply to GitHub/Microsoft, not third party scrapers.
Totally agreed. They don't have a trademark, and their superfans have no right to tell people how to capitalize or punctuate the term.
I also get the sense that the author has an inherently negative view of non-OSI-approved "source available" licenses -- and in particular the Business Source License, which he uses as a counterexample twice.
Yet, OSI cofounder Bruce Perens helped improve that license and specifically said "I feel it’s worthy of my endorsement. The new BSL will be a good way for developers to get paid while eventually making their works Open Source." [1]
Why do so many vocal people in the Open Source world have a much more extreme worldview than even an OSI cofounder?
I personally prefer Free Software (FSF-approved) or Open Source (OSI-approved) licenses, but I also agree that there is a place for other licenses. It's better that there's space for kinda-open, rather than it being open vs completely closed repositories.
I've previously worked at a company using an "open source" license (Elastic, with the ELv2) and have enjoyed having to explain the difference to folks between what it meant to be "open source" vs "Open Source", and the fact that a lot of folks generally don't understand the difference and some of the nuance. Mentioning the BuSL was because it's something a lot more folks may be aware of, i.e. given Hashicorp's recent relicense (as with other companies in recent years)
Sustainability is hard, and having different ways to describe this is good! But it's a lot harder when people don't understand why something calling itself "open source" when it's "but you can't run it if you're a company" is bad
> I also agree that there is a place for other licenses. It's better that there's space for kinda-open, rather than it being open vs completely closed repositories.
That's good to hear, sincere apologies for assuming otherwise. There are a lot of folks on HN who take a much more extreme view there, and I seem to have incorrectly conflated them in the "open source" vs "Open Source" debate.
> having to explain the difference to folks between what it meant to be "open source" vs "Open Source", and the fact that a lot of folks generally don't understand the difference and some of the nuance
This speaks to the core naming problem though: the original OSI folks should have picked a better term! They thought "Free Software" wasn't a good term in part due to the gratis vs freedom confusion (totally agreed here), and yet they picked another equally-confusing term to use instead, that had a pre-existing generic meaning which wasn't related to specific license terms in any way.
> Why do so many vocal people in the Open Source world have a much more extreme worldview than even an OSI cofounder?
In my experience talking with many such people over decades... it's usually some type of personality disorder. I quit FOSS because of how prevalent this egotistical dogmatism persona is.
Besides the users that never stop complaining and love to make absurd demands of unpaid volunteers, a very depressingly-large number of other developers you end up working with are so self-absorbed and uninterested in actually getting along with other people that their only means of discussion is always about how everyone else is wrong and there can be no other valid opinions.
Not sure if the article was edited later, but there are five sentences after that one, expanding on the author's reasoning for their position.
> Next time, lead with that.
The post is titled "I Will Never Use AI to Code"... whether you agree or disagree with the author's position, he's certainly not burying the lede here.
I also can't help but notice the author isn't telling other people not to use AI, he's merely stating his own preferences and articulating his reasoning in depth. Why attack him for expressing his personal preferences in how he goes about his own work, which presumably does not affect you in any way?
I'm skeptical about that page's accuracy. For example, if you go to the breakdown tab, it shows Actions having 100% availability when the graph starts (Apr 2016), yet Actions didn't even exist until late 2018, and wasn't GA until a full year after that. So if the math behind the "average" tab is treating NULLs as 100% uptime, this just isn't a correct measurement.
The page also notes it obtains its data from the official status page, but big tech companies have been known to under-report outages. My general sense is they've gotten better about this in recent years; if so, that means historical data will give an erroneously rosy picture of uptime.
We can clearly draw a conclusion that their availability is getting worse, but that's not what your original comment claimed.
You said "I can't really remember any significant downtime before the Microsoft acquisition and the data supports my memories", but my memories differ (as do other commenters), and the accuracy of the supporting data seems questionable.
> migrate their codebase to a new language[2], continue to drop their inhouse ops for Azure resources and get off MySQL
The recent blog post you're linking to mentioned moving data only for webhooks off MySQL, not all relational data used by the entire site; and moving "performance or scale sensitive code out of Ruby", again not the entire codebase.
Do you have an official source suggesting these migrations are more comprehensive than that?
I do not know - this is the only source I'm aware of and the wording is vague enough that the above is just my interpretation of it. It could be highly targeted but the manner of wording indicates a strong preference that smells of a large migration.
What part of the wording gives you that impression? On these topics, the post literally just says the following:
"bottlenecks that appeared faster than expected from moving webhooks to a different backend (out of MySQL)"
"Similarly, we accelerated parts of migrating performance or scale sensitive code out of Ruby monolith into Go" (in a paragraph specifically about "critical services like git and GitHub Actions")
> While we were already in progress of migrating out of our smaller custom data centers into public cloud, we started working on path to multi cloud. This longer-term measure is necessary to achieve the level of resilience, low latency, and flexibility that will be needed in the future.
That paragraph read, to me at least, that the initial targeted changes were just the tip of the iceberg and that much heavier lifting than initially budgeted were now in scope.
"smaller custom data centers into public cloud" is talking about their Azure migration, so "multi cloud" would almost certainly mean extending a presence into AWS and/or GCP (or maybe others like OCI).
I'm sorry but I really don't see how you're drawing conclusions about this meaning a move off of Ruby and MySQL entirely. That's a huuuge logical leap away from what is written in this post, and you originally stated it in a way that indicated this was a fact.
If a decent number of people migrate away, it would definitely show up in aggregate: Windows Update traffic, for example. Or sales of Windows-specific software/subscriptions. It doesn't require correlated tracking at an individual customer level to see the broader trend.
> open source should not imply open community, even if that's what the originators of the movement intended.
I'd take this a step further and say the intention of the originators of the movement is somewhat irrelevant, because that movement essentially retconned a bunch of pre-existing licenses and concepts.
Consider the MIT license, which is OSI-approved but substantially predates the "open source movement" (as do many other popular OSI-approved licenses). This license was created not to foster collaboration, but rather simply to avoid legal overhead for software that wasn't expected to have much financial value: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License#History
Nowadays, because this license meets the OSD and is OSI-approved, people like GP come across any MIT licensed project and inherently assume the developers are part of the "open source movement" and should follow its social contract. Frankly, that's just BS and we should call it out accordingly: license choice alone does not logically imply anything about following a social movement.
I suppose, but I like to call my software "open source," and it's a little hard to use their name but argue I'm not "one of them."
Granted I only use the term for lack of a better one, I actually prefer calling it Free Software when I'm around people who know the difference. The problem is that it's confusing for everyone else, since I do think it's fine to charge money for my "free software."
> it's a little hard to use their name but argue I'm not "one of them."
That's fair, but personally I can't see any reasonable fault with using "open source" in a way that strictly follows the definition in the OSD, and not this intangible unwritten social norm / movement stuff. If they wanted that to be a core part of it, it should have been in their definition to begin with.
And even religiously following their definition for licensing is a bit ridiculous, because they didn't actually invent the term in the first place. Originally, "open" source code was generically understood to mean "the source code is available" without any implications about licensing, let alone community or social norms. For a lot of irrefutable evidence around this, see https://dieter.plaetinck.be/posts/open-source-undefined-part...
So the OSI folks took this previously-generic term and popularized their definition for it, creating a movement around it. They even attempted to trademark it, and were explicitly rejected due to the term being too descriptive/generic.
Nonetheless, I personally avoid calling software "open source" if it uses a non-OSI-approved "source available" license, but that's purely because the many OSI zealots are very vocal, and they defend the term purely through social pressure.
Considering that Free Software predates Open Source, and many popular OSI-approved licenses also predate Open Source, how can you justify your core claim upthread:
> The people that see open source code and assume that it is being developed collaboratively are not being unreasonable – that’s the purpose of the open source movement. If that’s an inaccurate assumption for your software, then that’s fine – but it’s you that is breaking social norms, not them.
It sounds like you think anyone who selects an OSI-approved license, and makes the code publicly available, is somehow explicitly opting-in to the Open Source movement, and users should "reasonably" expect collaborative development as the default. Is that accurate? Because it seems completely nonsensical to me, especially considering the licenses predate the movement.
When you come across a random project using an OSI-approved license, there's no way to know the developers' motivations for selecting that license, if they haven't explicitly stated it. Your default seems to be an assumption that they're opting in to the "open source movement" and all of the social norms that you wrap up in that, but your assumption can be completely wrong, and that doesn't mean the developers are "breaking social norms" of a movement that they never subscribed to in the first place!
> the poster's lament that he's nostalgic for a time he never knew is one I've heard a _lot_
For sure; the 2011 film Midnight in Paris is a great comedic exploration of this feeling as its central theme. (well, if you can set aside any well-justified reservations about writer/director Woody Allen.)
Do you really think this singular author is writing multiple excessively-long blog posts about AI per day? There are ~650 of these posts over the past 18 months. And over on LinkedIn, the author describes himself as a "Specialist in Digital Marketing, Videography / Video Editing, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, and B2B Sales."
YMMV but this post and entire site absolutely screams "slop" to me.
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