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)
That is a good thought.
Shame they don’t have anything themselves that’s worth the trouble to copy back.
Let’s dismiss all chinese contributors to open source projects with AI, javascript, PHP and so on.
Aren’t Alibaba and Huawei huge on opensource?
As China leap frogged west in solar and EV tech
I’ve seen what’s inside the speed controllers and battery monitoring circuitry for Chinese EVs. I don’t think I want to be anywhere near them.
That they got from the West when CATL bought out a bankrupt US company that had developed LFP to commercial viability.
That’s called value investing… Maybe our dear leader should learn how to manage national wealth instead of cutting companies and allowing a geopolitical adversary to take over tech/IP
Ie this is not a flex you think it is, it just proves my point that our dear leaders are incompetent imbiciles or worst… Bad faith actors.
No accountability leads to this sort of decision making lol
Bad faith, for sure, made very clear in the last 20 years.
I think the two of you are focusing on either end of this and not really seeing the bigger picture.
China absolutely (stole / acquired) all the technology they have for solar, EV, and grid based storage. They have literally innovated 0% in this particular industry. I don’t think there’s any debating this aspect.
At the same time, China has pour billions into domestic production of solar panels, lithium and sodium batteries, vehicle production, and grid based storage solutions the likes that no other country has even remotely attempted. They recent demonstrated cheap sodium based 10MWh storage systems that can be built using seawater sodium. Something that California makes a shit ton of in their desalination plants, that they currently just shove the salt off as waste byproduct.
Like, if we wanted to, that kind of thing that China just demonstrated, we could be building GWh level storage systems for 10% the cost of a 1 GWh nuclear facility strictly off a byproduct that California distinctly doesn’t want and is literally paying people to take away. They could literally flip a cost into a revenue stream, but we don’t because “reasons”. We could literally have large batteries charged in Utah, and then use rail to move the sodium based batteries into the Eastern sections of the US, using literally the same infrastructure that we use today to move the tons of coal we move around for the TWh of power we generate. We could be doing this today. But we don’t because many nations just buy the arguments politicians feed them, or “it’s complicated”. And then there’s China demonstrating at small scale that it’s doable. So instead we say “oh well it wouldn’t scale” or “oh well you stole all that tech” because apparently our pride is more important than climate change.
The thing is, yes China has not committed to educating their population into novel development of these technologies. But at the same time they are deploying this stuff at rates every other developed nation has said they’d like to try and do that one day off in the future. Or can’t do right now because their hands are tied.
For the folks pointing at China as the enemy, fine. I’m not going to debate it. But there’s still things to learn from what they are doing with that stolen technology. Do we need to cozy up to them? Nah. But they’re showing off that grid based storage at scale and cheap is a thing even though people like France and the US say that such a thing is not possible at this time. They are showing LFP is viable if you’re willing to take an initial domestic loss to invest in the infrastructure, something the US citizens know but keep saying “well oil interest are holding us back”. No, there’s only a few dozen oil execs, there over a three hundred million non-oil execs. It’s a lack of will power.
Like most western nations keep coming up with excuses for delaying EV and green technology pushes and China keeps showing many of the excuses given to be false. And we know they’re false. We know the expectation of no less than $36k USD for an EV is some bullshit that car companies are pulling to offset all the baggage they have from leaving ICE. We know we could have charge stations every 100 miles on the Interstates, but we don’t because oil companies don’t want to lose their investments in the infrastructure they’ve got right now.
We know the reasons being given by our political and industry leaders are all bullshit. China is over there showing IRL how bullshit they are. Yeah, they stole everything they have, but at the same time all this “oh we couldn’t possibly do that here in the US” is shown for the BS it is, that we already know it to be, in China.
I mean, great, we’re all very smart people. Awesome. What good is that awesome smartness if we keep letting dumb fucks in politics pander off dumb excuses for why we don’t get to enjoy any of the stuff that awesome smartness provides? What good is being innovative if corporations keep handicapping that innovation to ensure they have a steady stream of revenue?
I mean yeah, let’s call China out of the bullshit they pull. But I mean, let’s not forget all the damn windows we’ve broken ourselves in our glass house here.
Why move the batteries instead of “moving” the electrons? You generate the electricity anywhere you want and use Therese nice cables that happen to be everywhere.
HVAC suffers from loss over distance. Large distances like what’s between the western US deserts and the eastern seaboard would suffer large losses to heat via HVAC.
HVDC can solve this, but that requires an investment into this kind of infrastructure. Moving the batteries is using a preexisting infrastructure because the assumption is that new infrastructure won’t be upgraded. We will build new so long as a ROI has quick turn around, another assumption here being that long term profit planning won’t happen so everything needs to be planned to have profiting within two or less years. But we won’t build new if usage of that new happens a decade later.
We could totally send the electrons over, but sending the batteries over is adding a bunch of assumptions that people won’t want to do massive investments in basic infrastructure to facilitate that, so we’ve got run with what we have that can ensure profits in a fairly rapid pace before investors bore of it or the next election cycle tosses everything in chaos.
Just my take but:
Like them or not (and IMV they are a serious threat), China’s system enforces a strategic view, long term, more like a 100yr plan.
We don’t. It’s by election cycle or quarterly earnings report.
These things all make more sense if you see them impassionately, and without an ethical filter, from a long term POV.
China will do what’s best for China in the long term. Irrespective of ‘politics’ that are like ripples upon a rising tide.
I absolutely do not discredit the scaling they’ve done in the manufacturing process, but if there’s one thing China does well, it’s scale manufacturing. That’s usually because they have much lower safety and quality standards, and might bring them up later on. But what they don’t seem to have, at least in these industries, is innovation in the underlying technology to any appreciable extent.
But hooboy, can they pump out solar panels and batteries when they’re taken off the leash.
And abso-fucking-lutely, we in Western countries continuously shoot ourselves in the foot with short-term thinking. There was a time it seemed when there were plans like the New Deal where thought was given to decades down the road. Today, the longest term outlook you see if 4 years. And that’s common across the board, I wouldn’t even place that just at the feet of the US. It’s a damn shame, and it’s the reason the middle class is getting hammered for the last 40 years. But we do know how to R&D, just now we can’t get build a manufacturing base without some grifter taking all the subsidies and shipping them offshore.
Now I’m depressed.
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?
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It’s not about laws at this level but about whether it is worth to do vs possible repercussions
Again, what repercussions? Who will enforce an ICC judgement against the CCP? Laws aside, what possible actions could be taken? I guess sanctions but that’s unlikely over something like this.
If it’s hosted in a public repo, anyone can clone it, that’s very much part of most git flows.
What you can do with the software, how you can use it, that’s another matter, based on the licence.
That of course assumes China will respect the copyright…
Sure, you can probably clone it - I’m not 100% sure, but I think laws protect that as long as it’s private use.
You can also fork it on GitHub, that’s something you agree to in the GitHub ToS - though I think you’re not allowed to push any modifications if the license doesn’t allow it?
Straight up taking the content from GitHub, uploading it to your own servers, and letting people grab a copy from there? That’s redistribution, and is something that needs to be permitted by the license. It doesn’t matter if it’s git or something else, in the end that’s just a way to host potentially copyrighted material.
Though if you have some reference on why this is not the case, I’d love to see it - but I’m not gonna take a claim that “that’s very much a part of most git flows”.
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.
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I’m not an engineer and I am employed, I do a little scripting for fun. Software developers should learn how to use git but I’m not one :)
%100 me when I first started github: “welp its saying something I dont understand, time to nuke the local copy and restart”
What use is Github / a Github clone to you without knowing git?
*self hosts gitlab with docker run
*still doesn’t know git
‘:confused jackie:’
So what are you using it for? (Not criticizing, genuinely curious)
The web interface is great and easy to use. I liked just dragging and dropping updated files to it, very simple.
Oh, didn’t even know you could do that, lol
Generally, I tend to think more in the direction of that there is some misunderstanding happening, then people being stupid. Maybe that is just the optimist in me.
What exactly is meant when people say they don’t know git. Do they mean the repository data format? Do they mean the network protocol? Do they mean the command line utility? Or just how to work with git as a developer, which is similar to other vcs?
I think if you use some git gui, you can get very far, without needing to understand “git”, which I would argue most people, that use it daily, don’t, at least not fully.
I don’t understand all 3 :)
JIAN YANG!!!
Ehrlich Bachman, this is your mom and you, you are not my baby.
you’re a fat, and a poor
I burn the garbage
i eat the fish
Eric, is a refrigerator running?
This is Mike Hunt - and he’s a rich.
And I was just asking yesterday what would you feel if someone evil used your FOSS software: https://lemmy.world/post/16898871
They should definitely respect the licenses, that being said, Microsoft owns GitHub and can be a bit quick in what they ban. It also means they are beholden to US laws, which could turn anti FOSS-AI in the near future.
This is a smart move and I honestly hope more countries start doing it. It would probably lead to a better ecosystem.
I think projects like this are good, but I really don’t want governments to create their own version of XYZ for the sake of creating clones of XYZ. I’m scared that all this will do is fragment an almost-universal collection of open-source projects into regional variants for no real reason.
“Governments” arent doing this. Its some company
In China, they’re the same picture.
Hey look, more crazy postings
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.
Oh, cool. I might finally find contributors to my projects.
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Maybe Lemmy will finally get good mod tools now.
That would be hilarious lol
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’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.
Ya, I kind of like the idea of code being put somewhere else just in case. It sucks it’s China, but I hate to see anything centralized in one company, especially if it’s a big public, good like Github and all it’s code.
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.
This isn’t people being influenced by AI. This is Microsoft’s Godzilla battling the RIAA/MPAA’s King Kong.
The trend, to date, has been consolidation of media properties under fewer and more hegemonic distributors. And now we’re seeing a couple of economic Titans battle over the position of “Last Legitimate Music Vendor”.
It depends on the software license.
Does it though? You can still put up a fork somewhere else as long as you uphold the license right? Unless I guess in the case where the license explicitly disallows forks, but I don’t think that’s very common (can you even do that?).
Forks are derivative works (quite obviously) so yes you can forbid them via license terms. Whether or not that’s still open source, take it up with OSI. I vaguely recall that at least once upon a time there was some project that required modification to the code to be published as separate patches and it was generally accepted to be open source don’t ask me which.
Most GitHub repos don’t have a license, meaning you are not licensed to do anything with them. Rehosting them would be the same as rehosting an image you don’t have a license for.
The only issue I see is that they make a new Chinese equivalent for GitHub where they can censor code easier (or was GitHub already blocked?), but they already censor everything anyway so there’s probably effectively no change.
Preparation for war.
Lmao the murican propaganda worked wonders on this guy
and the Chinese propoganda worked on 2 websites.
Free backups.
Yeah, why not. They are not cloning developers, yet. :)
God damn it, Jiaan Yang!
I call my uncle, he’s very corrupt
New New Internet.
