Unfortunately in the real world there’s this thing called money, and we exchange it for goods and services. The reason information isn’t free is because it costs time to produce it and people need to be fed.
If you believe that a creator doesn’t need to consent and doesn’t deserve credit or compensation for their work, then you’re likely not someone who has many fundamental needs unmet
These AI companies actively chose not to get consent from creators and earn billions from their content with no compensation.
Providing kickbacks to the repos being scraped would be a good way to help fund open source projects and pay creators like streaming services do. Seems like they're headed in this direction - it would be a massive product differentiator over GH
My first reaction was that I really like this idea.
If we had a system where people who access projects pay and popular FOSS developers get paid for it we'd have much better alignment.
My second thought was that bots would immediately try to circumvent such a plan. They'd probably spam Gitlab with fake repos to try to harvest those payouts.
I think the main issue here is that the access point for many OSS projects most of the time is package managers.
People often aren’t hitting up GitHub directly to get or install open source projects: they’re going via homebrew, npm, or whatever, so the registry becomes the source. Of course you can install directly from GitHub even with package managers but most times you don’t and it’s increasingly seen as a security issue.
On your second point, ugh, yes, you’re absolutely right. I don’t think it would work exactly the way you describe but, if there’s some automated revenue sharing/distribution, you can bet that people will find ways to exploit it via some form of spamming.
You're right. Blanket rate limits probably aren't a good way to handle the traffic profile of places git services.
Package managers tend to only need a small portion of what's in any given repo; some metadata to figure out what's going on and a single binary package is generally enough. The obvious answer is to separate those out and serve them differently from developers, who are actually monkeying around with the source code.
The problem with this is that paying is a massive friction point to joining that many people, wisley or not, are much more averse to than a free (if toxic) option.
Normally, this is manageable, but for product categories with a huge network effect (like social media) this is a death knell unless you have the users of that product category already used to paying (Adobe's network effect driven business model comes to mind), and even then the switching friction is greater since that usually means many people paying for two systems for quite a long time, if not indefinitely.
> They'd probably spam Gitlab with fake repos to try to harvest those payouts.
Yeah I wonder if the math would shake out to make that make any sense. Each bot would require a paid subscription, so the only incentive for them to do this would be if there was some discoverability algorithm or SEO that that traffic helped push the content to real users
The guidance given seems to hurt open source projects, not help.
> Make the project private if the traffic is not coming from the audience you built it for, which stops anonymous callers reaching it at all. Or upgrade to Premium or Ultimate for much higher limits.
Three minutes after kickbacks were announced there would be a flurry of new repos being created with bots repeatedly scraping them just to get those kickbacks.
Why is that true? Some applications require file system access. People would grant the application the permission to access files like any other resource like camera, mic, location.
Because vulnerabilities, coarse access granularity and lazy or ill-informed users. E.g., you now grant cam access per domain. Changing functionality on that domain doesn't revoke permission, so a simple bait and switch is already possible. Now imagine granting access to your file system to some Microsoft domain and finding out that there was a change of heart and some new script has uploaded your files to OneDrive and deleted them from your disk.
Taking that logic of protecting users from themselves to the extreme, a website should not be able to display text either. Because it can use text to ask the user to open their explorer and delete the files manually.
I think the flow of Chrome where the user has to select a file from disk and then acknowledge a prompt that the site will have access to that file until they close the window is fine. But if Mozilla wanted to protect users from themselves even more, they could make it as strong as they like. For example, by requiring to turn the functionality on in about:config.
Not giving the user the choice at all, if they want a cloud only browser or a browser that lets them work with local files is the wrong way.
It seems a bit ridiculous but there’s definitely something here. I have been really enjoying building similar single-file prototypes with agents. They seem to have no trouble dealing with all the code being piled in one big file and you can skip all the complexity, time, and token cost of of bundling.
> Amazon is manipulating the marketplace for the customer to buy a product different from what they want
There is no expectation or regulation that a store is supposed to only show customers what they want. A retailer is going to sell you the items you're willing to buy based on what they think will help them drive the most profits.
Imagine for a moment you're a store that sells millions of different products. Now, imagine a customer walks into your store, and as per some government regulation "you're expected only to show the customers who walk into your store products that they want". It's a fairly ridiculous expectation.
People throw away so much strawberry in an effort to cut the leaves off. Just eat the leaves. Next time you go to eat a strawberry, try eating the leaves too - they're very mild in flavor, and you waste no strawberry!
I just rip the leaves off, which is very easy with the variety we eat here. I never would have thought to cut them off. Are your two strawberries different?
When I stopped smoking strawberry leafs where one recommended component of tobacco replacement. It does smoke well, and also makes a great component to tea. Never eaten it fresh tho.
In at least some varieties of strawberries, the top of the berry has the least flavor and sweetness, and the bottom has the most, so I don't feel like I'm losing much.
Most mass-produced strawberries people eat today are basically white on the inside and relatively flavorless to the real thing anyway, I don't think most people miss out if they eat or not the top of the berry.
Unfortunately in the real world there’s this thing called money, and we exchange it for goods and services. The reason information isn’t free is because it costs time to produce it and people need to be fed.
If you believe that a creator doesn’t need to consent and doesn’t deserve credit or compensation for their work, then you’re likely not someone who has many fundamental needs unmet
These AI companies actively chose not to get consent from creators and earn billions from their content with no compensation.
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