GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

At the time, I was doing Linux, OpenBSD and FreeBSD stuff in Bellingham. The reaction from the local and regional non-Microsoft community was really like "Holy shit what is going on down there?!"

My view is the copilot is not stealing open source code. It is learning from it just as a human reader would. People's disguste is based on the assimilation of what they thought was a human trait being machine derived from their work.

The copilot service backed by an army of actual humans wouldn’t be a story at all. Nor would anyone be angry, if an individual offered coding skills as a service, and had gone through the exercise of learning great amount to open source software to do so.

No open source license was written with this in mind. Because previously learning was something only humans could do and no one had issue with sharing that knowledge. Until licenses take machine learning use into account I see no problems with Copilot.

Source cannot be open if you restrict any viewing of it.

"[W]e inquired pri­vately with Fried­man and other Microsoft and GitHub rep­re­sen­ta­tives in June 2021, ask­ing for solid legal ref­er­ences for GitHub’s pub­lic legal posi­tions … They pro­vided none."

Well... DUH. Why would they? You want to possibly sue them. Why in the hell would they, or anyone, provide crucial evidence for your lawsuit before you've sued them, regardless of the case and circumstances? Of course they aren't going to provide evidence, because you are obviously going to then try to prove hypocrisy, whereas you might not have enough to go on if they don't talk. No corporate lawyer in their right mind would ever grant such a request. (Edit: You are quite literally asking what their legal strategy is going to be, before the lawsuit has occurred, and then trying to spin the refusal as a proof of guilt.)

That's like claiming that an alleged drug dealer who didn't talk without a lawyer present is obviously a criminal, because if he wasn't he would have talked. What a nothing of a point.

The point is not clear, but if I were to guess, it's that Github Copilot should come with a California Prop 65 warning, because it can give your code "cancer" (GPL-licensed snippets from sources like Linux codebas).

I feel "stealing your community" is lawyer hyperbole, but people also seem ok with what MS is doing with copilot, and I am not.

If you think what copilot is doing is ok, and there is nothing wrong with it, I'd love it if you could go through this small thought exercise, and see if it impacts your view at all:

Say you write a bunch of code, and release it under GPL. For the sake of argument imagine it is something complicated that you care about.

Now say another person is trying to do what your code does, and they find your code, a say "excellent". They then copy and paste it into their project, and release their code under a BSD license instead.

Would you consider this theft of your IP? The law certainly would, and I think most devs would as well.

What would you say if they instead release "their" code as public domain?

Now we'll go a bit further. Another person is trying to solve this problem in some commercial software. They find your code, copy-paste it into their project, then sell their software and don't release the source, or even acknowledge you.

Would you consider _this_ theft? again the law would.

Now, what if instead they found your code through the invalid BSD relicense? or the invalid public domain one?

To me every one of these would be theft, and every one would be required to required to release the source of projects that made use of my GPL'd code, under the GPL. That is literally the whole point of the GPL.

But let's imagine a different route.

A person is writing some code and can't work out how to solve a problem, so they ask on StackOverflow. Now another person comes along and answer the question by copy-pasting from your project into SO. The first person says "yay!" and then copies that code, and we repeat the above scenarios.

In an even more extreme case, imagine both of the above people work at the same large company - so neither knows or is even aware of the other - how does this impact what is going on? It's two people, but fundamentally the company is copying the original GPL code into SO, then copying it from SO into its proprietary code.

I get that MS and GitHub try to position it as if copilot is "creating code", but it is simply doing a statistical code completion that is demonstrably happy to copy and paste from the original source into the recipient code. To my mind all it is doing is providing a mechanism to launder GPL (or whatever) code into your own without the license, by slapping "ML" and "AI" on the process and requiring more than 3 keys to be involved.