I'm not sure it's that big of a deal, to be honest. I use private 3rd party Git servers for my work, I just Github to share publicly. It's the biggest site for open source, and everyone is on it. Same reason it's unlikely another social network will beat Facebook anytime soon or ever.

Also, Github is not Git. Git is completely free and open source. You could easily run a Git server on a second computer in your apartment and have it setup in 1 hour. Or get a VPS server for a few dollars a month and create your own cloud. Or just use any other 3rd party site, that is not owned by Microsoft, like I do.

I use Github for free. I have never paid them anything and never will. So, if anything, me using their service is wasting Microsoft's money. I'm okay with that.

The problem they have with it is that microsloth's automated programming service essentially copied itself from projects that are licensed as free software. It's reasonable to question whether copying pieces of free projects for closed projects is ethical, even if the end-"programmer" isn't aware that they're being copied.

It's clearly a violation of the license, just like you can't steal people's images and use it for machine learning. Though the image thing I believe stood up in court. No one has tried the AI programming yet, at least not on this level, so it has not been legally tested. But if the FSF does a lawsuit, they will surely win.

That said, most of my code is with permissive licenses, and I would be okay with anyone learning from it, people or machines. I mostly put the license to avoid legal liability, otherwise I would do public domain. I really don't care what anyone does with my code.

My code isn't worth being preserved for the future, but neither is MS's. Leaving as soon as I find the time. Don't need their services anyway. But what do firms do that really put the inventive stuff there, like Unreal (well, not free), Blender, ... ?

I personally never understood at all why people flock to social networks. Problem for software like Godot is, they don't have much of a choice if they want to bee heard and seen. Alternatives are rare, and setting up own servers has become out of fashion, and possibly out of financial reach.

What I find so pathetic about this is the secrecy MS keeps about their products (which are obviously pretty holey but it is hard to know to which extent in comparison to open source software) but the freshness which which they violate other licenses, with the usual tactics of the dishonest to discredit the honest to justify the own violations. The mindset spans from business right up to genocide.

(personal opinion)

    Are there any good links for noobs in networking/marketing anyone can think of?

    Hehe, haven't touched Windows since 7. I ran a Windows computer until last September, only because drivers for my telescope stuff were not available for Linux. Since Windows was out of updates it ran in relative quiet. Now that all is under lava that cheese is eaten.

    Yeah, that's the right question. If you want to make money, where to go. Apple lets you pay, which leads in the wrong direction, Google spies out your gut flora, Steam isn't much better, can't judge GOG, only that their Linux scripts need overworking because they use blanks in filenames rolleyes.

    Unity has a shop for such things, Godot seems to develop one, which are all good ideas. Maybe some very basic QA would be necessary. For my part the question is moot as long as I don't have much to show off. The usual problem, much fuzz in the head but not the time and power to realize ;-) :

    Unrelated: the emojis don't work for me, i only see A,B,C, ... (Firefox 91.10) ?

      Pixophir Blender, ... ?

      Blender Foundation does what it's always done. It stays self sufficient and hosts it's own services. It's also a non-profit in a wealthy developed country tbf and it's probably got access to decent grants and what not.

      cybereality Honestly, I think Windows 11 is really DOS with a skin.

      Always has been. 🔫🧑‍🚀

      Pixophir Unrelated: the emojis don't work for me, i only see A,B,C, ... (Firefox 91.10) ?

      you need to type something like :astro to have the autocomplete find you something. or try :smil

            Programming is like tightening in a screw: after tight comes off :-/

            I'm sorry to change be so far off topic, but does anyone happen to carve wood and happens to be near the Pacific Northwest?

            My first attempt at an actual plugin. Seems gif is too big. Basically it's a basic terrain generator where a Bézier curve defines the shape. Pretty much only useful for simple platforms or basic level block out and is pretty jank, but might interest some.

            https://github.com/Bimbam360/Curve_Terrain

              Gorgeous !

              Looking forward to the next generation of amd onboard graphics navi2 to get me a pc for development with low power consumption. Yay.

                Pixophir Prices on video cards are starting to drop because of fewer crypto miners, so it should be a good time to buy soon.

                  I have one. I got me a new PC last October. Had to, because the old one (just bought 5 months before) suffered from thermo-mechanical alteration when the place was covered by a lava flow from the Cumbre Vieja eruption. I paid 720,- Euros for an RX6700XT and 450,- for an AMD Ryzen 5800X :-/

                  Only problem with this PC is, it draws around 400 watts when overclocked, and still 70 when running within specification. Though it is blazingly fast. I say "problem" because my new place will be totally off grid with solar alone, begging a somewhat more modest approach to nightly hacking at the pc from the batteries. And, tbh, I am at an age where a cold beer in the fridge is more important than a few fps ;-)

                  Just read in the news that the EU will reign in the miners, among other things demanding from them to file in studies concerning environmental impact of their ... doings. Goes in the right direction, imo.

                  tl,dr: I find the approach to develop hardware that's less demanding energy wise deserves to be supported. Also, current vega based graphics of the 5x00G series are pretty good, but looking at what's ahead with faster ram and NAVI2 and even less power consumption it may be worth waiting. All of these can run what I am doing with CG.

                  Honestly, we don't even need new video cards or computers. Current hardware is already good enough to render completely photorealistic scenes in real time. The software is just far behind. Like my system, my CPU has 16-cores and 32-threads. Most software can barely take advantage of a fraction of that (a lot of software is still single-threaded, or parallel with weak algorithms). GPUs are super fast and powerful. So I think my current computer will be fine for another 5 years or even 10 years, and still see consistent improvement every year, provided the software can catch up.

                  That's exactly the point. It's more than enough power that we have, we rarely use it anyway.

                  Games as a whole and preparing data for the render pipeline don't lend themselves well to parallelization anyway. From my layman's observation, it is all far too sequential. Better applications lie in scientific calculations where a high exactness and numerical stability is needed, and models are calculated on a grid based approach. But games rarely have have that requirement.

                  It's a problem of resources. Making faster processors only requires a handful of technicians, and though it's tedious work it's only really difficult when they're shrinking the minimum resolution -- and even that is well-researched. Making software that takes advantage of multiple processors is a much harder problem, and everyone who touches any piece of software has to figure it out or they end up dragging everyone else back. When you program linearly there's no need to synchronize the results of an unknown number of processes (and you can't assume any number of threads beyond one).

                  Classic Example

                  Some programmers have told me that multi-threading is easy, but they're usually thinking of solutions that are really inefficient, like just locking anything that has to be shared. If every process has to wait on something, how are you improving anything? On the other hand, if you split data between threads, you lose efficiency in other ways, like threaded compression algorithms which may have exactly the same data in two threads, but the threads don't know that so they store it twice anyway.