GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

They don't even trust the thing to train it on their own code, yet their boss is over here telling us they are "learning". It's a damned insult.

> parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers; share it with other users

That is the most succinct and most accurate definition of Copilot I've ever seen.

If I copied code without the rights to it into code I have written at any company I would absolutely be fired. It would not be up for debate.

> Everyone looks at Stack Overflow all the time. You do it. I do it.

I don't - it is very infrequently that I would look at SO answers

> Nobody reads the licensing terms.

Yes, they absolutely do, because again OSS or the GPL is meaningless if people are ignoring the license. More over I would suggest you talk to your employer's legal and IP departments to let them know you're copying code you don't have rights to into their product.

> We all produce software with reskinned and taped together functions. A collage is still unique, creative, work despite being glued together with other people's art.

Wow.

Absolutely not.

Competent engineers know how to write code themselves, they aren't copy-pasting their way to a solution. That's why you get paid a lot - if I was happy with copy pasta solutions I would hire a bunch of badly performing uni students.

> Most songwriters will write a song with a part like someone else's song.

If two people write similar songs that does not mean one copied the other. If one person copies part of another person's song they will end up in court, and they will lose all the revenue from the entire work.

> The products you buy at a store are rip-offs of someone else's product.

The ripoffs that stay on the market are not made by copying the entire implementation.

> Everybody stands on the shoulders of giants before them. Such is learning, such is life.

I didn't say anything at all to imply that we didn't. What I said was you don't get to just copy other people's work and pass it off as your own.

> Get over it.

Just because you apparently can't actually write new code yourself doesn't mean that that applies to other people.

Also, you should really get your employer to tell you whether your proposal of ignoring copyright is ok.

What you are saying is that if I google some problem, and copy some code from, say, gecko, or linux, or gcc, etc into my proprietary closed source product, that perfectly ok and those silly open source people should keep it to themselves if they don't want me doing so.

But there's also a difference between "I searched for this and copied the code I found" and "I typed some letters

from their terms of service: "Short version: You own content you create, but you allow us certain rights to it, so that we can display and share the content you post." emphasis mine.

that's what they call the "Short version" of the following paragraphs, which are found here: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...

they allow themselves the right to display content you upload to others. GitHub does not seem to really put a cap on that in terms of what intentions it needs to have or for what purposes it needs to share your content.

this seems to me that, by putting your code on github.com, that you are granting GitHub license to show it to others. period. IANAL, but it seems like all code anyone puts on github.com is dual-licensed, at least. GitHub gets their own rights to your code.

I read this before I signed up, and while I can't remember if this exact passage was present at the time, I was ok with everything GitHub wanted at the time, and I continue to be.

githubcopilotinvestigation.com doesn't seem to have much hope of doing anything except getting people mad. but you all were already mad anyway, weren't ya?