Is it smart enough to:
- respect attribution
- respect copyleft
- respect proprietary licences
- give the user appropriate hints about the above
Or does it just copy code without doing any of this?
Copilot sells code other people wrote
11–20 of 838 posts
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#12I wonder if FOSS folks could copyleft originally public/leaked but proprietary code using CoPilot.
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#13I disagree. Copilot is selling content-aware code suggestions, which is a result of code that other people wrote in their platform, and which in no way affects the work of these people.
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#14I guess the question is where you draw the line between a derivative work and "learnt by an AI algorithm"
Who needs a line when there are plenty of obvious examples lifted verbatim?
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#15If GitHub could guarantee that the code Copilot had ingested was only made with OSS licenses, then I don't see what the problem is. But as far as I understand, GitHub trained Copilot on any public repository on GitHub, meaning even if it doesn't have a license specified (so the user publishing it still has the copyright to it), then I don't see how it can be OK.
It is hard to see how verifying licenses is a solvable problem, when licensing for code dependencies can be transitive. For ex - if I copy code from a GPL codebase like Linux and create a Github repository with an MIT license.
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#16I get the feeling this entire debate would have been non-existent had this been a Jetbrains product instead.
The whole thing is just bizarre when the vast majority of developers constantly look at OSS code daily and lift ideas/patterns/snippets from there regularly without once looking at whatever license is attached.
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#17Is it smart enough to: - respect attribution - respect copyleft - respect proprietary licences - give the user appropriate hints about the above Or does it just copy code without doing any of this?
No, it doesn't do any of that. However, it does not "copy code" except in marginal use cases, the far more common scenario is that it will suggest you very basic code that is akin to a Stack Overflow reply.
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#18GitHub provides the repo hosting and tools for free on public projects. I'm happy with this deal.
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#19If GitHub could guarantee that the code Copilot had ingested was only made with OSS licenses, then I don't see what the problem is. But as far as I understand, GitHub trained Copilot on any public repository on GitHub, meaning even if it doesn't have a license specified (so the user publishing it still has the copyright to it), then I don't see how it can be OK.
It is hard to see how verifying licenses is a solvable problem, when licensing for code dependencies can be transitive. For ex - if I copy code from a GPL codebase like Linux and create a Github repository with an MIT license.
You should be able to choose flavors of the model trained only on public-domain code which does not require attribution, for example.
But that would mean Microsoft acknowledging license violations.
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#20If GitHub could guarantee that the code Copilot had ingested was only made with OSS licenses, then I don't see what the problem is. But as far as I understand, GitHub trained Copilot on any public repository on GitHub, meaning even if it doesn't have a license specified (so the user publishing it still has the copyright to it), then I don't see how it can be OK.
Here's an example: https://twitter.com/ChrisGr93091552/status/15397316329318031...
> I checked if it had code I had written at my previous employer that has a license allowing its use only for free games and requiring attaching the license. yeah it does