471–480 of 585 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My favorite answer is: if you included Microsoft source code the quality of suggestions drops below viable product.
This is a funny and flippant answer, but is also nonsense.
I disagree with all of their reasons for disliking GitHub. * They make money from Co-Pilot? Great! * They sell software to ICE? Good. Why wouldn’t they? I’m not interested in anti-immigration-enforcement politics. * They’re a closed-source for-profit company? Great! That’s why their product is high quality.
> They make money from Co-Pilot? Great! OK let me take your projects and make money from them and not give you anything in return, not even credit. > They sell software to ICE? Good. Why wouldn’t they? I’m not interested in anti-immigration-enforcement politics. ICE policies aside, you should be interested in immigration politics because they're important to people and businesses. Apathy is a bad thing here. > They’r…
See git itself.
> If it is, as you claim, permissible to train the model (and allow users to generate code based on that model) on any code whatsoever and not be bound by any licensing terms, why did you choose to only train Copilot's model on FOSS? For example, why are your Microsoft Windows and Office codebases not in your training set? This is my favorite question about Copilot ever.
I mean the answer to that question is obvious: they're not under any obligation to include their own code in the training data. Why would they? A better question would be whether they would take legal action against a competitor that creates a copilot equivalent and publicly states that they trained it on leaked, proprietary M$ source code. That would actually be an example of hypocrisy.
Because these models work better with more data and presumably this a lot of high quality data that they already have lying around anyway? Because there no downside according to their own reasoning? Because it would shut up a lot of these criticisms right away? Because marketing would be so much easier with that kind of dogfooding?
In short: because according to their own story there would be only upsides, no downsides.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That list is a perfect example why GitHub is so problematic. Forget Copilot. Even without that you’ve put all of those services in one centralized basket, fully controlled by a for-profit company (with proven track record of unethical behavior). And not only that, but this is true for the vast majority of FOSS projects!
I see your point. The disagreement I have is I would not at all consider copilot as putting MSFT into the evil empire category yet. While it was very unnerving for the ownership to change, MSFT has really had a pretty hands-off approach on Github. I touched on it, but I still see this for-profit model as being compatible with FOSS. Specifically, make it free to FOSS so that those professional software developers then…
I don't understand why you're essentially resetting their reputation in regards to GitHub.
This GitHub Copilot thing is pretty polarizing. According to one of the expert papers they sollicited, it's unlikely MSFT/GitHub is breaking any copyright laws. What they're doing does feel icky, and they could have mitigated a few concerns by a) making the inventory of the full training set public and b) at least attempt to attribute if there is a direct copy (which by their own admission happens about 0.1% of the t…
>at least attempt to attribute if there is a direct copy (which by their own admission happens about 0.1% of the time). IIRC they just block that suggestion if they detect it's a copy now
The copilot saga hasn’t even played out yet. If it turns out when the legal fog clears that anyone using copilot is always personally responsible for making sure the code was theirs to use (which I see as the likely outcome)- then what difference does copilot make? It basically lets people copy paste FOSS code automatically. We could always do that and they we were always responsible for the consequences. The idea th…
The copilot saga hasn’t even played out yet. If it turns out when the legal fog clears that anyone using copilot is always personally responsible for making sure the code was theirs to use (which I see as the likely outcome)- then what difference does copilot make? It basically lets people copy paste FOSS code automatically. We could always do that and they we were always responsible for the consequences. The idea th…
how does a clean-room implementation of anything works anyway? people personally testify that they haven't seen the thing they want to cleanroom implement, right? and what if they did see it, how would anyone know/catch them? something is too similar is not proof. what if the implementer read a random comment on it on HN that laid out the general architecture of the thing, does make the result a derivative work?
Copyright only applies to expression (code) not ideas. It would be extremely hard for anyone to re-implement anything in a matter exact enough to be plagiarism.
For a clean room impl the fear would be patents, not copyright.
Any software lacking patents can (my armchair lawyer guess) safely be re-implemented. If people reimplementing have had past access to the source code of the original, that's probably not even a great danger, so long as nothing is copied verbatim. Ideas/designs/architecture/functionality is not protected by copyright.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That list is a perfect example why GitHub is so problematic. Forget Copilot. Even without that you’ve put all of those services in one centralized basket, fully controlled by a for-profit company (with proven track record of unethical behavior). And not only that, but this is true for the vast majority of FOSS projects!
I see your point. The disagreement I have is I would not at all consider copilot as putting MSFT into the evil empire category yet. While it was very unnerving for the ownership to change, MSFT has really had a pretty hands-off approach on Github. I touched on it, but I still see this for-profit model as being compatible with FOSS. Specifically, make it free to FOSS so that those professional software developers then…
The question is not whether Microsoft should be put into the evil empire category, but if they really left it or are just pretending like they did every time before.
As a leader of a FOSS project that is on github, and migrated off of sourceforge because SVN and email patches were not scaling - I'm a bit confused by this article. Co-pilot has issues, ergo github is going the way of sourceforge, and so now we must abandon github? Do I have that reasoning correct? We need to: - migrate the bug queue - have all links in commit history break - application integration with githib for…
> As a leader of a FOSS project that is on github...Do I have that reasoning correct? The way I read the article was that by being on GitHub, you are implicitly agreeing to no longer be a FOSS project as regards licensing. GitHub customers can use Copilot to generate proprietary code that's identical to your project's code (several articles I have read call this overall idea "laundering through Copilot", which sounds…
How is that different/new? Anyone has always been able to just take your code and put it into their proprietary projects...