Does GitHub not have the right to view and train from your content when you agree to their Terms of Service and upload your code?

People are conflating their open source license with the one they give GitHub when making a GitHub account, but they are two entirely separate and parallel licenses. The former is for other people to use your code, the latter is for GitHub to host your code.

If you don't like it, you are free to host your code on your own servers.

And anyway, as noted the other day about AI, it is often funny to see people not care about (or even enjoy) AI in other fields that they don't work in, but when it comes for their own field, they are suddenly very worried. See programmers on HN who argue for Stable Diffusion but against Copilot, and vice versa with artists on Twitter. As I commented then, it's an act of cowardice to think our own profession should be immune from AI while we enjoy the fruits of AI in other fields [0]:

> Yes, many of us will turn into cowards when automation starts to touch our work, but that would not prove this sentiment incorrect - only that we're cowards.

>> Dude. What the hell kind of anti-life philosophy are you subscribing to that calls "being unhappy about people trying to automate an entire field of human behavior" being a "coward". Geez.

>>> Because automation is generally good, but making an exemption for specific cases of automation that personally inconvenience you is rooted is cowardice/selfishness. Similar to NIMBYism.

We should want AI. That we then try to use outdated models like copyright to enforce holding back human progress is a true shame. In my view, so what if GitHub uses people's code for training data, we are all getting a better product because of that.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33226515#33228948

There are quite a few projects that didn't originate on Github. Some are mirrors of projects hosted elsewhere, some accept patches through other means, some include code that predates github. If get your linux kernel patch accepted by emailing it to the responsible maintainer, it will end up on https://github.com/torvalds/linux. But you never agreed to the Github ToS, all you did was agree to publish it under the GPLv2. Linus agreed to the Github ToS, but he can't give away rights he doesn't have, so he can't be giving Github any rights to your patches that go beyond the GPL.