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Ask HN: What can I personally do to fight AGAINST the Copilot class action?

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Re: Ask HN: What can I personally do to fight AGAINST the Copilot class action?

#31

Post by throwaway675309 »

ogarten wrote: post #27
ohashi wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From an end user perspective, CoPilot has made my coding life dramatically better than any other tool I think I've ever used. The next closest being a good IDE which added code completion, documentation for functions, etc. What it's functionally doing is incredibly valuable and I want to see it succeed. Figuring out how to navigate licensing effectively is an important step, but as someone who writes open source, I a…

The problem is, that it's not only open source but also private repositories on GitHub which aren't open source and might never be.

That's not their stated position, obviously it's hard to verify but from there official stance:

"GitHub Copilot is powered by OpenAI Codex, a new AI system created by OpenAI. It has been trained on a selection of English language and source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub."

Re: Ask HN: What can I personally do to fight AGAINST the Copilot class action?

#32

Post by throwaway675309 »

bugfix-66 wrote: post #4

I think it's you who are in the "vocal minority". Microsoft Copilot is an abuse of open source. It is perhaps the greatest theft of intellectual property in human history. We should do everything we can to defeat it. That said, here is my Request For Comments regarding a slightly modified BSD 2-Clause License explicitly prohibiting Copilot-style use: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33458374 We need to do everyth…

Completely disagree. I think that the output that it produces is sufficiently transformative to be considered fair use, and even when people coerce it to produce code verbatim - it represents a fraction of the original code base.

It would be like if J. K. Rowling went to war over the fact that I lifted a few paragraphs from Harry Potter and used them in an entirely different book.

Also this is entirely anecdata, but at my company I'd say we have about a dozen other engineers actively using copilot and not a single one of them has an issue with it. (ideological or otherwise)

Re: Ask HN: What can I personally do to fight AGAINST the Copilot class action?

#33

Post by [deleted] »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #11
bugfix-66 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It boggles the mind. I was also in disbelief when I saw this post.

You do have to admit that it is Microsoft (and the other vendors of similar CoPilot-like services) that are on the side of "Information wants to be free!" this time. The irony of FOSS advocates reversing course on their own principles to oppose it is deep indeed.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What can I personally do to fight AGAINST the Copilot class action?

#34

Post by endofreach »

drstewart wrote: post #25
bugfix-66 wrote: post #4

I think it's you who are in the "vocal minority". Microsoft Copilot is an abuse of open source. It is perhaps the greatest theft of intellectual property in human history. We should do everything we can to defeat it. That said, here is my Request For Comments regarding a slightly modified BSD 2-Clause License explicitly prohibiting Copilot-style use: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33458374 We need to do everyth…

I love the people that spent decades railing against intellectual property laws and how you can "steal" knowledge are suddenly Disney-level militants on protecting software copyrights

I doubt any of those would have a problem if it wasn‘t a mega corp like microsoft trying to make profits of that. Microsoft has a history of being evil.

Not dramatized, evil is the correct word to describe many pf their practices.

Re: Ask HN: What can I personally do to fight AGAINST the Copilot class action?

#36

Post by quickthrower2 »

warning26 wrote: post #9
mixmastamyk wrote: post #6

What a bizarre post. I haven't come to a definitive conclusion on the subject, but "how can I help a trillion-dollar organization?" is very far from my first thought on it. Is this a service folks have become dependent on?

You need to think bigger — if the class action wins, it effectively would ban training AI classifiers on internet data. Yes, we all want to stick it to Microsoft, but that’s not what’s at stake here.

Internet data? Copyright, licenses like GPL MIT etc. mean nothing if it is just all “internet data”.

Re: Ask HN: What can I personally do to fight AGAINST the Copilot class action?

#37

Post by imtringued »

jleyank wrote: post #2

Well, if they're profiting by serving copyright or copyleft code up for others to use after stripping the associated licensing I would think they're in a bad place. Unless their side effect is (again?) to break GPL and other open-source licenses? I would think this a risk that commercial customers would want to avoid - getting something GPLv3 or other "infecting" licenses contaminating their product due to a develope…

GPL or AGPL doesn't infect anything.

You choose what license you want to use. If you violate the GPL license by including GPL software in your application then you must remove the GPL software as you do not have the right to copy it in that context.

If your application is written by exclusively copying GPL code, then obviously the entire application will be under the GPL license because you didn't write any of the code.

Re: Ask HN: What can I personally do to fight AGAINST the Copilot class action?

#38

Post by imtringued »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #18
bugfix-66 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't take a person's name off their work and sell it. People who work hard to produce open source software expect credit and acknowledgement for their work. That's why almost every license has an attribution clause. If you don't want credit for your work, you use the MIT No Attribution License: https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT-0 Not widely used, as you might expect.

Such a short-sighted view. The grand goal of FOSS was the abolition of copyright protection for code and and the end of proprietary software, was it not? Credit and acknowledgment doesn't even figure into it. What is a ML model that has knowledge of huge swaths of humanity's code (eventually all of it) and can serve as an assistant to build any kind of software on demand if not a huge milestone on the road to the tot…

> The ML model would replicate anything with a modest bit of effort.

Yeah, by stealing it.

Last time someone wrote a comment on HN on this topic he insulted a library author and said something like "you are just bitter that eventually this AI software will be able to write your opensource library based on the GitHub description alone"

Well, of course it does, it can just literally search through GitHub and produce a verbatim copy.

Re: Ask HN: What can I personally do to fight AGAINST the Copilot class action?

#39

Post by BerislavLopac »

throwaway675309 wrote: post #31
ogarten wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, that it's not only open source but also private repositories on GitHub which aren't open source and might never be.

That's not their stated position, obviously it's hard to verify but from there official stance: "GitHub Copilot is powered by OpenAI Codex, a new AI system created by OpenAI. It has been trained on a selection of English language and source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub."

A repository being public does not mean that it's open source.

Re: Ask HN: What can I personally do to fight AGAINST the Copilot class action?

#40

Post by imtringued »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #11
bugfix-66 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It boggles the mind. I was also in disbelief when I saw this post.

You do have to admit that it is Microsoft (and the other vendors of similar CoPilot-like services) that are on the side of "Information wants to be free!" this time. The irony of FOSS advocates reversing course on their own principles to oppose it is deep indeed.

You mean they want to abolish intellectual property by allowing proprietary code fed through the AI to be stripped of copyright? Because that would be the end of copyright.
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