- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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)
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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.
Even this Chinese company, why do they care to clone it all? It’s already all hosted and publicly available.
Until it isn’t. Perhaps they are preparing for a future war with the US and assume their access to all that code will be blocked. They want to copy it now while they have access.
Good point.
The real solution is to include a few
tiananmenSquarevariables in all the repositories. Either they exclude the entire repository or just the specific file, in either case the entire project may be unusable.It’s a new coding paradigm, I will take some time getting used to looking for libraries in the
uyghur/tianamenfolder.China filters every byte of Internet traffic in and out of the country.
It seems naive to think they can’t accomplish the same thing for a GitHub mirror.
They’re not supposed to, it’s just about blocking them from using the software :)
So… You’re saying instead of “main”, “app”, or “core”, we should change the convention to make tiananmenSquare the entry point for apps?
Or maybe make it the filename for utils, so it’ll just break
For example.
But honestly I was more joking. The thing that makes most projects useful is the developers developing it, and they can’t clone that
everyone should have stuff in their code comments, tianamen, hong kong, taiwan, uyghurs
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genius.
create a GitHub repo with Markdown articles outlining human rights abuses by the CCP
Once you have logged “China killed 100 Zillion people! End CCP now!” in Chinese GitHub, everyone in China will realize that their lives are actually very bad and they need to do a Revolution immediately.
And here I was thinking that might prevent them mirroring the repo but whatever
Maybe we should consider the same for the US government instead of being afraid of the big Chinese boogeyman across the sea? Because I guarantee you the US has just as many, if not more. But China bad. 🙄
I was making a joke about abusing Chinese censorship in order to stop them cloning GitHub repos (assuming that was something you wanted to do). The joke being that the CCP suppresses information about their human rights abuses. That is not true of the US. You could absolutely make a GitHub repo detailing the crimes of the US government. Nobody will stop you.
Tell that to Julian Assange
Is that what you think got him in trouble?
yes. he published us crimes in iraq/afghanistan.
50 Cent Army Repellant:
六四
1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre
I always thought the term “Wumao” sounded suspiciosly like “woo Mao.”
426
Yes yes, what about the US?
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Tankie whataboutism strikes again.
Two things can be bad at the same time. Wild, I know.
Edit: also, the point of my joke wasn’t the human rights abuses. It is that these things are censored in China. So your comment is even more irrelevant. One could very easily create a repo outlining American crimes and put it on GitHub. But doing so in China with CCP crimes will have you sent to a Gulag
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I’m not American. I don’t even like America.
Hell even i’m American and don’t like America
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Lmao it’s literally the name of a logical fallacy. How is the term itself fallacious?
Also I harbour no racism or ill will toward the Chinese people. My girlfriend is Chinese and I care about her a lot and love learning about her culture. I just don’t abide the human rights atrocities (or censorship thereof) committed by any government.
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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.
And under copyleft licensing, they’re allowed to do that. Both to GitHub repositories and Wikipedia.
Of course they are, it’s not like there is some kind of international jurisdiction anyway. What is bothersome is why they do it.
Even if there was jurisdiction, anyone in the world is entitled to do it by the very licenses these works are released under.
Hopefully they follow the rest of the stipulations of the licenses, such as the common one about keeping the license as such and contributing the changes back.
This seems like the most plausible explanation. Only other thing I can think of is they want to develop their own CoPilot (which I’m guessing isn’t available in China due to the U.S. AI restrictions?), and they’re just using their existing infrastructure to gather training data.
Just like russias mirror of wikipedia which is heavily edited to discredit the west.
How come I live in Russia and have never seen such?
I know only of quite a few troll\counterculture projects, some, like Lurkmore, are already, well, dead, some, like Traditsiya, are not.
That, of course, if you don’t mean that Russian Wikipedia in itself has problems. Which would be true.
It’s called Ruwiki.
It was launched in June 24, 2023 as a fork of the Russian Wikipedia, and has been described by some media groups as “Putin-friendly” and “Kremlin-compliant”.
OK. Well, not sure anyone really uses that.
Open source? Or open source with a non-commercial restriction?
Why would that matter? You can fork such projects too.
Seems easier to commercialize a mirrored site?
Firewalls are already being built in america’s internet with the ban of tiktok
As an european i do not see problem with having copies of free software in places not controlled by the monopoly microsoft is morphing to.
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 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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
I complain all the time. But that’s not the subject of this post…
Yeah exactly, fuck llms that don’t honor licenses
while nearly no one is complaining about MS using github to train their copilot LLM,
Lots of people complained about that. I’ve only seen this single thread complaining about this.
nearly no one is complaining about MS using github to train their copilot LLM
What rock have you been living under??
Came here to say this. As much as I don’t like china, there is really nothing to see (apart from the source, that’s for everybody to see).
This could be illegal for git repos that do not have a open source license that allows mirroring or copying (BSD, Apache, Mit, GPL, etc.) Sometimes these repos are more “source available” and the source is only allowed to be read, not redistributed or modified. I would say that this is more of a matter for each individual copyright holder, not Microsoft.
But ultimately I agree, this really isn’t as big of a deal as people are making.
edit: changed some wording to be clearer
China is a sovereign entity. I’m pretty sure they can decide foreign licensing laws don’t apply there.
China is a soverign state and they should make their own laws. However, China has promised repeatably that they will take IP concerns more strictly (trade deal with Trump in 2020 is one example of this promise). It seems of this moment they still use the World Intellectual Property Organization for inspiration for their IP laws. At one point, China did not acknowledge IP rights at all but chose to acknowledge them in order to secure foreign business trade. Being consistent is good for business; especially when it comes to international business.
In 1980, China became a member of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). As of at least 2023, China’s view is that WIPO should be the primary international forum for IP rule-making. - Wikipedia
China has never been consistent. Doing business there is all about relations with the CCP. This is a perfect example of how an authoritarian regime differs from a liberal regime. One is bound by it’s promises and rules and the other binds it’s rules to it’s needs.
Not like MS couldn’t be sued.
It may be expensive but possible.
Unlike China. Good luck suing china (or the chinese government) as a whole. Maybe you’ll get out a domestic ban but I can hardly believe that they will care and probably will continue with their operation. But now it’s not on very legal grounds.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?
That depends on how similar your resulting algorithm is to the sources you were “inspired” by. You’re probably fine if you’re not copying verbatim and your code just ends up looking similar because that’s how solutions are generally structured, but there absolutely are limits there.
If you’re trying to rewrite something into another license, you’ll need to be a lot more careful.
What’s the limit? This needs to be absolutely explicit and easy to understand because this is what LLMs are doing. They take hundreds of thousands of similar algorithms and they create an amalgamation of it.
When is it copying and when it is “inspiration”? What’s the line between learning and copying?
I disagree that it needs to be explicit. The current law is the fair use doctrine, which generally has more to do with the intended use than specific amounts of the text/media. The point is that humans should know where that limit is and when they’ve crossed it, with motive being a huge part of it.
I think machines and algorithms should have to abide by a much narrower understanding of “fair use” because they don’t have motive or the ability to Intuit when they’ve crossed the line. So scraping copyrighted works to produce an LLM should probably generally be illegal, imo.
That said, our current copyright system is busted and desperately needs reform. We should be limiting copyright to 14 years (as in the original copyright act of 1790), with an option to explicitly extend for another 14 years. That way LLMs can scrape comment published >28 years ago with no concerns, and most content produced >14 years (esp. forums and social media where copyright extension is incredibly unlikely). That would be reasonable IMO and sidestep most of the issues people have with LLMs.
First, this conversation has little to do with fair use. Fair use is when there is an acceptable reason to break copyright. For example when you are making a parody or critique or for education purposes.
What we are talking about is the act of reading and/or learning and then using that information in order to synthesize new material. This is essentially the entire point of education. When someone goes to art school, they study many different artists and their techniques. They learn from these techniques as they merge them together in different ways to create novel art.
Everybody recognizes this is perfectly OK and to assume otherwise is absurd. So what we are talking about is not fair use, but extracting data from copyrighted material and using it to create novel material.
The distinction here is you claim when this process is automated, it should become illegal. Why?
My opinion is if it’s legal for a human to do, it should be legal for a human to automate.
What we are talking about is the act of reading and/or learning and then using that information in order to synthesize new material.
Sure, but that’s not what LLMs are doing. They’re breaking down works to reproduce portions of it in answers. Learning is about concepts, LLMs don’t understand concepts, they just compare inputs with training data to provide synthesized answers.
The process a human goes through is distinctly different from the process current AI goes through. The process an AI goes through is closer to a journalist copy-pasting quotations into their article, which falls under fair use. The difference is that AI will synthesize quotations from multiple (many) sources, whereas a journalist will generally just do one at a time, but it’s still the same process.
As I am a big proponent of open source, there is nothing wrong even with copying code - the point is that you should not be allowed to claim something as your own idea and definitely not to claim copyright on code that was “inspired” by someone else’s work. The easiest solution would be to forbid patents on software (and patents altogether) completely. The only purpose that FOSS licenses have is to prevent corporations from monetizing the work under the license.
Well let’s say there’s an algorithm to find length of longest palindrome with a set of letters. I look at 20 different implementations. Some people use hashmaps, some don’t. Some do it recursively, some don’t. Etc
I consider all of them and create my own. I decide to implement myself both recursive and hash map but also add certain novel elements.
Am I copying code? Am I breaking copyright? Can I claim I wrote it? Or do I have to give credit to all 20 people?
As for forbidding patents on software, I agree entirely. Would be a net positive for the world. You should be able to inspect all software that runs on your computer. Of course that’s a bit idealistic and pipe-dreamy.
again, I don’t have a problem with copying code - but I as a developer know whether I took enough of someone else’s algorithm so that I should mention the original authorship :) My only problem with circumventing licenses is when people put more restrictive licenses on plagiarized code.
And - I guess - in conclusion, if someone makes a license too free, so that putting a restrictive (commercial) license or patent on plagiarized / derived work, that is also something I don’t want to see.
I have no problem copying code either. The question is at what point does it go from
- I’m reading code and doing research
To
- I’m copying code
How abstracted does it have to be before it’s OK? If you write a merge sort, it might be similar to the one you learned when you were studying data structures.
Should you make sure you attribute your data structure textbook every time you write a merge sort?
Are you understanding the point I’m trying to get at?
My trivial (non legal ;) answer is: If you are working for a corporation that is looking to patent something / make something closed license: the moment you ever looked at a single line of my code relevant to what you are doing, you are forbidden from releasing under any more restrictive license. If you are a private person working on open source? Then you be the judge whether you copied enough of my code that you believe it is more than just “inspired by”.
Are you just trying to make a bad pro-China argument or have you never been online before?
I see it more as a good anti-Microsoft argument 🤷🏻♀️
“Why does no one say murder is bad unless China is murdering”
Isn’t a good anti-murder argument
“Why does no one say murder is bad unless China is murdering”
I can not fathom how you absolutely nailed the essence of my comment, yet misunderstood it (and - arguably - your own example) so fundamentally.
Let me try to help, once:
“Why do most people not complain about murder when Microsoft is doing it, but when China is doing it, the very justified outrage can be heard?”
❤️
I cannot fathom how you absolutely nailed the essence of my comment, yet misunderstood it (and - arguably - your own example) so fundamentally.
People do criticize Microsoft for using open source data to train LLMs, just like people criticize murder
Hence the query about having never been on the internet before
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 expect it’s going likely to be used to train some Chinese AI model. The race to AGI is in progress. IMO: “ideas” (code included) should be freely usable by anyone, including the people I might disagree with. But I understand the fear it induces to think that an authoritarian government will get access to AGI before a democratic one. That said I’m not entirely convinced the US is a democratic government…
PS: I’m french, and my gov is soon to be controlled by fascist pigs if it’s not already, so I’m not judging…
I expect it’s going likely to be used to train some Chinese AI model.
Even if they do that, the license for open source software doesn’t disallow it from being done.
It certainly can. Most licences require derivative works to be under the same or similar licence, and an AI based on FOSS would likely not respect those terms. It’s the same issue as AI training on music, images, and text, it’s a likely violation of copyright and thus a violation of open source licensing terms.
Training on it is probably fine, but generating code from the model is likely a whole host of licence violations.
Most licences require derivative works to be under the same or similar licence
Some, but probably not most. This is mostly an issue with “viral” licenses like GPL, which restrict the license of derivative works. Permissive licenses like the MIT license are very common and don’t restrict this.
MIT does say that “all copies or substantial portions of the Software” need to come with the license attached, but code generated by an AI is arguably not a “substantial portion” of the software.
code generated by an AI is arguably not a “substantial portion” of the software
How do you verify that though?
And does the model need to include all of the licenses? Surely the “all copies or substantial portions” would apply to LLMs, since they literally include the source in the model as a derivative work. That’s fine if it’s for personal use (fair use laws apply), but if you’re going to distribute it (e.g. as a centralized LLM), then you need to be very careful about how licenses are used, applied, and distributed.
So I absolutely do believe that building a broadly used model is a violation of copyright, and that’s true whether it’s under an open source license or not.
By comparing it to the original work.
And how will you know what original work(s) to compare it to?
I agree with you, and don’t really have any answers :)
The code needs to maintain the copyrights and authors. They are “mirroring” usernames into their own domain, with mails that dont correspond to the original authors, stealing their contributions.
with mails that dont correspond to the original authors,
Oh! I didn’t realise this. Do you have an example?
That would make it plagiarism, which ethically is a whole different matter than merelly copying that which is free to copy.
I’m seeing this misconception in a lot of places.
Just because something is on GitHub, doesn’t mean it’s open source. It doesn’t automatically grant permission to share either.
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Correct, you are allowed to click the “fork” button and nothing else. You’re still not allowed to download, use, modify, compile or redistribute the code in any way that doesn’t involve the “fork” button.
It may not be de jure open source, but if the code is posted publicly on the internet in a way that anyone can download and modify it, it sort of becomes de facto open source (or “source available” if you prefer).
Please don’t muddy the water with terms like this. Something is open source if and only if it has an open source license.
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
US will try its best to block technology, including open source projects.
You can’t block open source projects from anyone. That’s the entire point of open source. For a license to be considered open-source, it must not have any limitations as to who can use it.
You can’t block open source projects from anyone.
I think they were referring to blocking GitHub from public access. In the event of a world war I could easily see Microsoft obeying the order to shut down GitHub.
But china bad and scary.
fun to think that my shitty program is now stored in an artic vault and stored in some Chinese servers
So many bugs I never fixed and yet here we are lol
The great thing about China is that it’s got lots of people eager to fix those bugs
You haven’t worked with a lot of Chinese engineers, have you? https://www.chinaexpatsociety.com/culture/the-chabuduo-mindset
Just discovered I was Chinese all this time!
I love how they reinvent a universal experience as uniquely Chinese
They stole half assing it from the West!
Not as bad as you make it out to be, and I actually worked in the US with more Chinese engineers than US engineers.
I didn’t down vote you. I’m not saying all Chinese engineers are bad, I’m just saying a lot are bad or don’t care enough about details just execution as fast and with as little effort as possible.
Quick, someone tell Nintendo!
Someone reupload yuzu, stat!
I love how every Chinese company is called “China”
Yeah… That’s because they are. it is required that every Chinese Company has to be owned by “tHe PeOpLe” (CCP)
Gotta disguise being a capitalist country somehow.
Capitalism is when the public owns the things. And Communism is when a handful of private individuals owns the things.
So what’s it called when the government is a handful of private individuals, as opposed to representing the public?
Oligarchy or aristocracy, and that’s Russia. And the US at this point lol.
The Aristocrats
Badum tish!
No… Capitalism is when a handful of individuals own the means of production and have full authority on how they are used.
Communism is more akin to when the workers decide what to do with the means of production they operate.
You got this literally backwards.
Lmao
Facebook = America
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
Edit: also some background info about the company behind GitCode from my other comment: the company behind GitCode is funded and owned by CSDN (China Software Developer Network) and the actual infrastructure and service is provided by Huawei Cloud. On the website they have written this statement in the registration page.
CSDN is mostly a platform to share posts on software development, but it is known to have a lot of issues, including:
- poor content and directly copied posts from other people without consent, which to a point people is considering the site a content farm; it is even a top blocked site on Kagi;
- 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.
- 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.
Put content that is illegal in China into your code, problem solved!
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AbstractBaseWinnieThePoohFactory
The phrase Tiananmen Square massacre in each file.
Actually that happened 😂 they accidentally “mirrored” some activists’ repository and got blocked temporarily
It is not illegal is it?
If it is legal, then thank you China for the free backup.
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.
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”.
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.
You can buy pirated software or pre-cracked consoles in stores there. They don’t care.
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.
Some random Chinese company: does something jenky
Blogger: “The entire country of China is doing this jenky thing!”
All Chinese companies are the CCP. That’s how the system works.
And all US companies follow US laws and crazy people say they do the bidding of CIA/NSA/FBI- which they do, to a degree.
Yea they would have to do their bidding if the government came knocking with subpoenas.
Funny how you say something similar and we have such different karma for it.
Might be because of our approaches?
Your’s comes across as a sort of whatabout that nobody asked for and mine is just a statement of fact related to what you mentioned.
It’s not inaccurate to say that the Chinese government has a tighter leash on all business in their country than the US has in theirs though.
And they have been!
The random Chinese company: owned by Huawei and CSDN (where CSDN is known to be the worst site known to Chinese developers where they literally costs money to let you download open source code)
Edit: i think my original is a bit unclear, so this is a more detailed info: the company is funded and owned by CSDN (China Software Developer Network) and the actual infrastructure and service is provided by Huawei Cloud. On the website they have written this statement in the registration page.
CSDN is mostly a platform to share posts on software development, but it is known to have a lot of issues, including:
- poor content and directly copied posts from other people without consent, which to a point people is considering the site a content farm; it is even a top blocked site on Kagi;
- 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.
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.
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.
Ahh, thanks. I think that may be a grandad level pun
Bs
