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GitHub Copilot

copilot.github.com

111–120 of 1001 posts

Re: GitHub Copilot

#113
This is hardly grounds for celebration. Another step in Microsoft's efforts to drive down programmer salaries by expanding the work force.

Also, this tool will enable more cheap LOC churn for those gaming performance reviews (not that this is currently difficult, but it will be even easier).

Re: GitHub Copilot

#114
post #48

So if it was trained using "source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub." was it also GPLv2? So everything generated also GPLv2?

No, a model trained on text covered by a license is not itself covered by the license, unless it explicitly copies the text (you cannot copyright a "style").

The trained model is a derivative work that contains copies of the corpus used for training embedded in the model. If any of the training code was GPL the output is now covered by GPL. The music industry has already done most of the heavy lifting here in terms of scope and nature of derived works, and while IANAL I would not suggest that it looks good for anyone using this tool if GPL code was in the training set.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#115

So if it was trained using "source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub." was it also GPLv2? So everything generated also GPLv2?

I think this would fall under any reasonable definition of fair use. If I read GPL (or proprietary) code as a human I still own code that I later write. If copyright was enforced on the outputs of machine learning models based on all content they were trained on it would be incredibly stifling to innovation. Requiring obtaining legal access to data for training but full ownership of output seems like a sensible middl…

1) this is not human, it's some software

2) if I write a program that copies parts of other GPL licensed SW into my proprietary code, does that absolve me of GPL if the copying algorithm is complicated enough?

Re: GitHub Copilot

#117

Four years later: your AI replacement? When do you all predict something like this will happen?

Maybe thirty four years later. I don't think there's AI to gather requirements, talk to people, understand a problem and produce code. That's kinda general intelligence level AI. But this thing can possibly make devs work easier and if it's good enough maybe smaller teams can produce more.

This will allow for a D or C level coder to be a B/B- coder which is great, quality goes up. But corps will use this to depress wages and finally be able to create that wonderous unicorn of completely fungible coder.

This kind of tooling is akin to the crossbow.

It will allow for less skilled folks to push out code that is like other code at great speed. A copy pasta accelerator if you will.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#118
post #48

So if it was trained using "source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub." was it also GPLv2? So everything generated also GPLv2?

No, a model trained on text covered by a license is not itself covered by the license, unless it explicitly copies the text (you cannot copyright a "style").

My guess is that it is, if we think of a machine learning framework as a compiler and the model as compiled code. Compiled GPL code is still GPL, that's the entire point.

Anyways, GitHub is Microsoft, and Microsoft has really good lawyers so I guess they did everything necessary to make sur that you can use it the way they tell you so. The most obvious solution would be to filter by LICENSE.txt and only train the model with code under permissive licenses.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#119

Hi HN, we've been building GitHub Copilot together with the incredibly talented team at OpenAI for the last year, and we're so excited to be able to show it off today. Hundreds of developers are using it every day internally, and the most common reaction has been the head exploding emoji. If the technical preview goes well, we'll plan to scale this up as a paid product at some point in the future.

[deleted]

Re: GitHub Copilot

#120

So if it was trained using "source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub." was it also GPLv2? So everything generated also GPLv2?

I think this would fall under any reasonable definition of fair use. If I read GPL (or proprietary) code as a human I still own code that I later write. If copyright was enforced on the outputs of machine learning models based on all content they were trained on it would be incredibly stifling to innovation. Requiring obtaining legal access to data for training but full ownership of output seems like a sensible middl…

What if I put a licence on my Github-repositories that explicitly forbids the use of my code for machine-learning models?
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