China is attempting to mirror the entire GitHub over to their own servers, users report

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

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.

If we steal IP from China does the American government give us a business loan?

It is not illegal is it?

If it is legal, then thank you China for the free backup.

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.

God damn it, Jiaan Yang!

Yeah, though the Chinese government isn't doing this out of the goodness of their heart, this is what open source is about.

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.

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:

1. 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;
2. 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;
3. You have to login to copy code on the post, and sometimes hides half the post to require you to login to read.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Preparation for war.

Quick, someone tell Nintendo!

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.

Put content that is illegal in China into your code, problem solved!

I love how every Chinese company is called "China"

I'm surprised this wasnt done already

Someone reupload yuzu, stat!

Some random Chinese company: does something jenky

Blogger: "The entire country of China is doing this jenky thing!"

It is a new "internet" archive without copyright bla bla? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

omw to get all the homebrew stuff NIntendo got removed from github lol

JIAN YANG!!!

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.

Free backups.

*New GitHub

Oh, cool. I might finally find contributors to my projects.

And I was just asking yesterday what would you feel if someone evil used your FOSS software: https://lemmy.world/post/16898871

Shame they don't have anything themselves that's worth the trouble to copy back.

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.

When they mirror it, does they uses a different username? If so I'm totally fine as that's just a fork, otherwise it should count as stolen. Not the project but the name and reputation of the owner.

But at what cost???

Well now chinese companies that use free softwware don't have an excuse to share their modifications of their software product.

What, even the private gits???

Cloned even?

Maybe they were open source projects?

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

That is a good thought.

There is always something you can do about it. Always.

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.

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.