Comment by martzy13
10 days ago
I don’t know that GitHub per se would be a requirement, But when I think open source - I usually think about being able to browse the code in some type of repository, in a human readable format.
I like to browse a codebase in some way that I don’t have to download and unzip an unknown set of files.
> I don’t know that GitHub per se would be a requirement
Indeed.
Although providing a browsable source tree is convenient, we shouldn't default that on Microsoft's private platform (which, after all, monetizes the code stored there by using it for LLM training).
If a project is free software or open source, Codeberg.org is an excellent solution, while there exists a whole host of other web git hosts as well.
Let's take advantage of the field's diversity, lest it narrows down on us abruptly.
I understand you prefer to be able to browse the code online, and that does seem to be largely the norm with most projects, but from a technical/legal perspective, my understanding is that the only actual requirement is that source code is provided if requested, they don't even have to post it anywhere on the Internet in advance. It could just have been emailed to you or something. But people usually put a link up somewhere just to make it easier.
Yeah, open source never meant you must provide an online repository in perpetuity for everyone.
It means you can get the code if you want it. If you have to pay for postage so someone can send you a floppy with the source code, it's still open source. It's open to you.
More importantly it means once you have the code you can then give it to others both with and without modifications.
Open source != provided source control repository
I think that's debatable. Many open source licenses have a definition of accessible source code that is similar to:
> The "source code" for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.
Certainly, in the past "a tarball of the source for whatever version you have" was absolutely considered sufficient for that. But these days the features provided by source control systems, such as "annotate"(/"blame"), "bisect", etc... could very well be argued to have raised the baseline for what "the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it" should mean.