this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2024
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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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[–] 0x0@programming.dev 1 points 5 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] passepartout@feddit.org 1 points 5 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 0 points 5 months ago (2 children)

And under copyleft licensing, they're allowed to do that. Both to GitHub repositories and Wikipedia.

[–] Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 0 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] passepartout@feddit.org 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Of course they are, it's not like there is some kind of international jurisdiction anyway. What is bothersome is why they do it.

[–] acockworkorange@mander.xyz 0 points 5 months ago

Even if there was jurisdiction, anyone in the world is entitled to do it by the very licenses these works are released under.

[–] 31337@sh.itjust.works 0 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.zip 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] passepartout@feddit.org 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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".

[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.zip 0 points 5 months ago

OK. Well, not sure anyone really uses that.

[–] ifsocialismwasabear@lemmy.ml 0 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] Hello_there@fedia.io 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Open source? Or open source with a non-commercial restriction?

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Why would that matter? You can fork such projects too.

[–] Hello_there@fedia.io 0 points 5 months ago

Seems easier to commercialize a mirrored site?