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FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

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Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#11

Post by grepfru_it »

thomzane wrote: post #2

I am excited to see where these questions lead.

Something like this?

  [GitHub Copilot License Config Menu]
  Show suggestions with the following tags:
  - [ ] GPLv3
  - [x] GPLv2
  - [ ] AGPL
  - [x] CC-BY-SA
  - [x] Apache License
  - [x] MIT License
  - [ ] No License Attribution

Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#12

Post by nitrogen »

colechristensen wrote: post #10
pkrefta wrote: post #5

I'm using Github to publish my code and seriously I don't care whenever Copilot was trained using it. I published it and in the end somebody can do anything with it without giving a damn about license, copyright etc - that's the truth of open-source.

Well then you're a BSD-license kind of person. Not everybody is and that's ok too.

The BSD license still requires attribution and copyright notices visible to the end user.

Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#13

Post by xxpor »

davisr wrote: post #7

The ignorance in this comment section is already giving me an aneurysm. Software licenses matter. Copyright matters. If megacorps like Microsoft can sue people into oblivion for violating their copyright terms, people can sue Microsoft into oblivion for violating theirs. I don't use MS Github, I have no skin in the game, but I hope there is at-least a $1000 award to every instance of AGPL and GPL license violation be…

Software licenses have barely been tested in court, let alone how they apply to code injected and combined with other code via machine learning. You're extremely overconfident about how this will actually play out.

For one, just because your code is covered by the GPL, it doesn't mean every single line in isolation is copyrightable. It has to demonstrate creativity. That's why you don't have to worry about writing for (int i = 0; i < idx; i++) {.

Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#14

Post by slownews45 »

e40 wrote: post #8
slownews45 wrote: post #3

Anyone feel like FSF moved from maybe engineering idealists to a very lawyer driven type org? The big GPLv3 push and development - plenty of attacks on folks actually shipping product on GPLv2 and building communities around that model (which keeps software free but allows users of the software to do what they want with it pretty much including putting in devices that are locked down - cars / tivo's etc). Here's an o…

No. The FSF had lawyers from the beginning and always thought (I talked with RMS in the early 80's some) that enforcement was part of the plan.

Sure, but the GPLv2 was very freedom oriented. Enforcement practically was relatively sparse and more educational I thought. Ie, release the TiVo source code, but we don't care that Tivo's are locked down.

Is anyone building strong communities on AGPLv3 / GPLv3? I feel the momentum shifted towards Apache / MIT style licenses unfortunately.

Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#15

Post by detaro »

slownews45 wrote: post #14
e40 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. The FSF had lawyers from the beginning and always thought (I talked with RMS in the early 80's some) that enforcement was part of the plan.

Sure, but the GPLv2 was very freedom oriented. Enforcement practically was relatively sparse and more educational I thought. Ie, release the TiVo source code, but we don't care that Tivo's are locked down. Is anyone building strong communities on AGPLv3 / GPLv3? I feel the momentum shifted towards Apache / MIT style licenses unfortunately.

> but we don't care that Tivo's are locked down.

They literally made the GPLv3 because they cared about that very much.

Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#16

Post by dunham »

grepfru_it wrote: post #11
thomzane wrote: post #2

I am excited to see where these questions lead.

Something like this? [GitHub Copilot License Config Menu] Show suggestions with the following tags: - [ ] GPLv3 - [x] GPLv2 - [ ] AGPL - [x] CC-BY-SA - [x] Apache License - [x] MIT License - [ ] No License Attribution

Would that require generating 2^n models or can models be combined?

Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#17

Post by danhor »

slownews45 wrote: post #3

Anyone feel like FSF moved from maybe engineering idealists to a very lawyer driven type org? The big GPLv3 push and development - plenty of attacks on folks actually shipping product on GPLv2 and building communities around that model (which keeps software free but allows users of the software to do what they want with it pretty much including putting in devices that are locked down - cars / tivo's etc). Here's an o…

This is more of a tangent, but I found this framing very interesting: > which keeps software free but allows users of the software to do what they want with it pretty much including putting in devices that are locked down - cars / tivo's etc

The FSF considers the user to be the one using cars/tivo's/other devices. In their view, this was a design flaw of gplv2 that it allowed locking out end-users of their devices.

For Linux this was not the case. The important part that modifications/extensions were shared (and maybe even upstreamed), while the end user access wasn't important.

The case of tivoization fractured the interest between the mostly moral "I want freedom for the end user" and the more immediately benefical "If you use my code, I want reciprocity for modifications".

I personally believe that today the latter case won, even for a lot of non-gpl software that gets lots of contributions e.g. via github for lots of different reasons, but the moral case gets more dire.

Looking at security for older (or shockingly often even current) devices, right to repair and lots of other issues concerning the effective loss of rights with more modern devices, the concerns of the FSF were often accurate, but with the increasingly hostile approach to "proprietary" IP and thus the exclusion of GPLv3 and similar licenses not palatable to the larger open source community.

The approach to IP in china is also sometimes a lot different, see https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297.

Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#18

Post by laumars »

slownews45 wrote: post #3

Anyone feel like FSF moved from maybe engineering idealists to a very lawyer driven type org? The big GPLv3 push and development - plenty of attacks on folks actually shipping product on GPLv2 and building communities around that model (which keeps software free but allows users of the software to do what they want with it pretty much including putting in devices that are locked down - cars / tivo's etc). Here's an o…

I’m all for advancing machine learning but given how much big corporations aggressively defend their IP, it’s a hard pill to swallow if someone shrugs off a potential misuse of open source code. The law is the law and if it’s ok for Microsoft to defend their copyrights then it’s ok for the FSF to defend my copyrighted code too. The fact that I licensed it GPL was intentional — if I didn’t give a crap what happened to the code then I’d have used BSD or similar. But I chose to place restrictions and I’m very much interested to see if training proprietary AI models are legally covered under those restrictions.

Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#19

Post by bluGill »

xxpor wrote: post #13
davisr wrote: post #7

The ignorance in this comment section is already giving me an aneurysm. Software licenses matter. Copyright matters. If megacorps like Microsoft can sue people into oblivion for violating their copyright terms, people can sue Microsoft into oblivion for violating theirs. I don't use MS Github, I have no skin in the game, but I hope there is at-least a $1000 award to every instance of AGPL and GPL license violation be…

Software licenses have barely been tested in court, let alone how they apply to code injected and combined with other code via machine learning. You're extremely overconfident about how this will actually play out. For one, just because your code is covered by the GPL, it doesn't mean every single line in isolation is copyrightable. It has to demonstrate creativity. That's why you don't have to worry about writing fo…

While they are not tested, anything other than accepting the idea kills the idea of software completely. There is lots of room to change details, but somehow copyright and the fact that the code is copied into computer memory needs to be reconciled.

Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#20

Post by blendergeek »

slownews45 wrote: post #3

Anyone feel like FSF moved from maybe engineering idealists to a very lawyer driven type org? The big GPLv3 push and development - plenty of attacks on folks actually shipping product on GPLv2 and building communities around that model (which keeps software free but allows users of the software to do what they want with it pretty much including putting in devices that are locked down - cars / tivo's etc). Here's an o…

> The big GPLv3 push and development - plenty of attacks on folks actually shipping product on GPLv2 and building communities around that model (which keeps software free but allows users of the software to do what they want with it pretty much including putting in devices that are locked down - cars / tivo's etc).

The users of the software are the owners of the devices. The distributors are the ones locking down the devices to prevent the users from modifying the software (often so that the distributors can control something else the users are doing).

GPL is about end-user freedom (as opposed to software distributor freedom). This is why GPLv3 exists.

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