alt Hacker NewsThere are plenty of commercial pirates, and those commercial uses were grouped in with noncommercial sharing in much the same way you are doing with scraping. Am I wrong in assuming most of this scraping comes from people utilizing AI agents for things like AI-assisted coding? If an AI agent scrapes a page at a users' request (say the 1 billionth git commit scraped today), do you consider that "loot[ing] a store"? What got looted? Is it the bandwidth? The CPU? Or does this require the assumption that the author of that commit wouldn't be excited that their work is being used?
I'd like to focus on your strongest point, which is the cost to the companies. I would love to know what that increase in cost looks like. You can install nginx on a tiny server and serve 10k rps of static content, or like 50 (not 50k) rps of a random web framework that generates the same content. So this increase in cost must be weighed against how efficient the software serving that content is.
If this Github post included a bunch of numbers and details demonstrating how they have reached the end of the line on optimizing their web frontend, they have ran out of things to cache, and the increase in costs is a real cause for concern to the company (not just a quick shave to the bottom line, not a bigger net/compute check written from Github to their owners), I'd throw my hands up with them and start rallying against the (unquestionably inefficient and on the line of hostile) AI agent scrapers causing the increase in traffic.
Because they did not provide that information, I have to assume that Github and Microsoft are doing this out of pure profit motivations and have abandoned any sense of commitment to open access of software. In fact, they have much to gain from building the walls of their garden up as high as they can get away with, and I'm skeptical their increase in costs is very material at all.
I would rather support services that don't camouflage as open and free software proponents one day and victims of a robbery on the next. I still think this question is important and valid: There is tons of software on Github written by users who wish for their work to remain open access. Is that the class of software and people you believe should be shuffled around into smaller and smaller services that haven't yet abandoned the commitments that allowed them to become popular?
> There are plenty of commercial pirates, and those commercial uses were grouped in with noncommercial sharing
I don't think many people were particularly sympathetic to people making money off piracy - by and large, people were upset because people committing piracy for personal use were getting hit with the kinds of fines and legal charges usually reserved for, well, people who make money off piracy.
> Am I wrong in assuming most of this scraping comes from people utilizing AI agents for things like AI-assisted coding?
Yes. The huge increases in traffic aren't from, say, Claude going and querying Github when you ask it to, it's from the scraping to drive the initial training process. Claude and the others know the first thing about code because Github and StackOverflow were part of their training corpus, because the companies which made them scraped the whole damn site and used it as part of their training data for making a ~competing product. That's what Github's reacting to, that's what Reddit reacted to, that's what everyone's been reacting to - it's the scraping of the data for training that's leading to these reactions.
To be clear, because I think this is maybe a core of our disagreement: The problem that's leading to this isn't LLM agents acting on behalf of a user - it's not that Cursor googled python code for you - it's that the various companies training the models are aggressively scraping everything they can get their hands on. It's not one request for one repo on behalf of one user, it's the wholesale scraping of everything on the site by a rival company to make a rival product, most likely in violation of terms of service and certainly in violation of anything that anyone could reasonably assume another corporate entity would stand for. Github's not mad at you, they're mad at OpenAI.
> There is tons of software on Github written by users who wish for their work to remain open access. Is that the class of software and people you believe should be shuffled around into smaller and smaller services that haven't yet abandoned the commitments that allowed them to become popular?
You store your money in a bank. The bank gets robbed repeatedly by an organized group of serial bank robbers, and increases security at the branch. You move your money to another bank, because the increased security annoys you. You understand the problem here may repeat itself elsewhere as well, right?