GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#111

Post by macintux » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 9:20 PM UTC

hekec wrote: post #64

On their website they say that "GitHub Copilot is a code synthesizer, not a search engine: the vast majority of the code that it suggests is uniquely generated and has never been seen before. We found that about 0.1% of the time, the suggestion may contain some snippets that are verbatim from the training set." So it won't copypaste your code. It had just read code from open sources and learned from it - similar to w…

> So it won't copypaste your code.

You might want to check out this video...

https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#112

Post by Engineering-MD » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 9:23 PM UTC

blibble wrote: post #75

hmfrh wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you open-sourced code and allowed it to be used for commercial purposes Uploading it to Github does not transfer ownership or imply allowances for any use. If you upload it without a license it is a copyright violation to copy the code. Even with an MIT license it is a copyright violation to copy the code without attribution. > I don't see the point of being pissy about Github using it, I'm saying this as someon…

> People are probably angry because this is yet another case of a big multinational corporation abusing unclear or difficult to enforce legislation for profit. it's worse than that: it's Microsoft trying to completely undermine the concept of open source meanwhile: they're unaffected as their high-value proprietary code remains private and doesn't train the model

Finally the angle for Microsoft buying GitHub becomes clear.

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#113

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 9:24 PM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #52

This is my take-home: > We are obsessed with shiny without considering that it might be sharp.

[deleted]

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#114

Post by kuschku » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 9:25 PM UTC

hmfrh wrote: post #15

iliekcomputers wrote: post #3

If you open-sourced code and allowed it to be used for commercial purposes, I don't see the point of being pissy about Github using it, I'm saying this as someone who's written quite a lot of MIT code. (And charging for a product which adds value to your developer experience and needs money to be run is not a bad thing)

> If you open-sourced code and allowed it to be used for commercial purposes Uploading it to Github does not transfer ownership or imply allowances for any use. If you upload it without a license it is a copyright violation to copy the code. Even with an MIT license it is a copyright violation to copy the code without attribution. > I don't see the point of being pissy about Github using it, I'm saying this as someon…

> you grant each User of GitHub a nonexclusive, worldwide license to […] reproduce Your Content […] as permitted through GitHub' functionality

If you upload code to GitHub, you grant them (and every GitHub user) a license to do exactly what Copilot does.

This ToS change happened 2017, and I actually had to get approval from all contributors of my projects to accept to the changed ToS: https://github.com/justjanne/QuasselDroid-ng/issues/5

What GitHub’s doing is shady, but it’s been obvious it was going to happen for years.

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#115

Post by nlh » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 9:27 PM UTC

I have a genuine question about this whole thing with Copilot:

A similar product, TabNine, has been around for years. It does essentially the exact same thing as Copilot, it’s trained on essentially the same dataset, and it gets mentioned in just about every thread on here that talks about AI code generation. (It’s a really cool product btw and I’ve been using and loving it for years). According to their website they have over 1M active users.

Why is this suddenly a huge big deal and why is everyone suddenly freaking out about Copilot? Is it because it’s GitHub and Microsoft and OpenAI behind Copilot vs some small startup you’ve never heard of? Is it just that the people freaking out weren’t paying attention and didn’t realize this service already existed?

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#116

Post by zmmmmm » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 9:27 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #53

ineedasername wrote: post #38

Can't you host code on GitHub that is not "free" for commercial use? If GitHub scraped these projects then it's a problem. Otherwise, Into honestly trying to have a conversation on this to understand the objections because I haven't made up my mind but struggle to see the problem. So pease consider the following: if the code was not encumbered by restrictions I don't see an obvious problem with this. Using code or da…

If an individual hypothetically painstakingly searched through GitHub to see how others wrote an API call and copy-pasted, almost no one would have a problem with that even if they didn't attribute every little code snippet. But some are bringing out the pitchforks because ML can basically do that painstaking search (yes, I know it's not literally a search) so efficiently that it's actually (maybe) useful as a tool.…

Scale, intent and impact do actually matter in copyright. Copying a single API can be ok, and copying a million of them might not be OK. There's a reason for the word "fair" in "fair use".

If a whole project was copied verbatim and the license violated I think everyone would agree that was wrong. So then is copying the same quantity of code across 1000 projects wrong?

Is setting up a process and a system that does that systematically, at scale with intent and then commercialises the result wrong?

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#117

Post by TeMPOraL » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 9:28 PM UTC

ineedasername wrote: post #40

hmfrh wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you open-sourced code and allowed it to be used for commercial purposes Uploading it to Github does not transfer ownership or imply allowances for any use. If you upload it without a license it is a copyright violation to copy the code. Even with an MIT license it is a copyright violation to copy the code without attribution. > I don't see the point of being pissy about Github using it, I'm saying this as someon…

Good point; if the code does not have a specified license then standard copyright terms apply and inclusion for commercial use should be verboten. It it's actually open source without commercial restrictions though, I don't see an ethical difference in using the code directly or for an meta analysis driving ML for enhanced code completion.

> It it's actually open source without commercial restrictions though, I don't see an ethical difference in using the code directly or for an meta analysis driving ML for enhanced code completion.

Most Open Source code comes with a requirement to carry over license note, which Copilot does not do. Additionally, ethics dictate you attribute the source when copying directly, something the Copilot also doesn't do.

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#118

Post by oaiey » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 9:28 PM UTC

Engineering-MD wrote: post #112

blibble wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People are probably angry because this is yet another case of a big multinational corporation abusing unclear or difficult to enforce legislation for profit. it's worse than that: it's Microsoft trying to completely undermine the concept of open source meanwhile: they're unaffected as their high-value proprietary code remains private and doesn't train the model

Finally the angle for Microsoft buying GitHub becomes clear.

There is zero rationale why Microsoft could not do it without buying GitHub. Hell, they could have trained the model from GitLab or Bitbucket public repos.

They need developer mindshare and they lost a lot of developers in the 2000s. Buying GitHub (and being involved in 100s of projects) brings this mindset of Microsoft as a developer company back to developers. Like as an advertisement platform/branding for some novel technology like this CoPilot.

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#119

Post by oaiey » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 9:30 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #114

hmfrh wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you open-sourced code and allowed it to be used for commercial purposes Uploading it to Github does not transfer ownership or imply allowances for any use. If you upload it without a license it is a copyright violation to copy the code. Even with an MIT license it is a copyright violation to copy the code without attribution. > I don't see the point of being pissy about Github using it, I'm saying this as someon…

> you grant each User of GitHub a nonexclusive, worldwide license to […] reproduce Your Content […] as permitted through GitHub' functionality If you upload code to GitHub, you grant them (and every GitHub user) a license to do exactly what Copilot does. This ToS change happened 2017, and I actually had to get approval from all contributors of my projects to accept to the changed ToS: https://github.com/justjanne/Qua…

Well a public repo can be cloned. And needs to be replicated in CDNs etc.

Is not that reproduction?

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#120

Post by zmmmmm » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 9:31 PM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #62

ineedasername wrote: post #38

Can't you host code on GitHub that is not "free" for commercial use? If GitHub scraped these projects then it's a problem. Otherwise, Into honestly trying to have a conversation on this to understand the objections because I haven't made up my mind but struggle to see the problem. So pease consider the following: if the code was not encumbered by restrictions I don't see an obvious problem with this. Using code or da…

> Can't you host code on GitHub that is not "free" for commercial use? If GitHub scraped these projects then it's a problem. It did. It's spitting up the AGPL in empty files, and AGPL'd code isn't free for commercial use. It requires people who use it to make changes available under the same license.

That seems really dumb since they have a well formalised system for people to declare their licenses. Even if people have shown isolated incidents of it, I'm still sceptical (for example, maybe someone put AGPL headers into a project they explicitly licensed MIT in their main license file etc).