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GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

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

#121

Post by moocowtruck »

nlh wrote: post #115

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…

it's just what the community does these days, bored and have to be upset about something, and being upset at big companies is trendy

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

#123

Post by echelon »

nlh wrote: post #115

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…

Because the repository trusted by millions is starting to do things we never anticipated. It's growing in ways that are a touch uncomfortable for some.

I think some are also beginning to feel an Amazonification happening. We built all the stuff and made it free, but now a company is going to own it and profit off of it.

Edit: If we want to prevent this, we need a new license that states our code may not be included in deep learning training sets.

Edit 2: if private repository code is in this training set, it may be possible to leak details of private company infrastructure. Models can leak training data.

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

#124

Post by jrm4 »

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)

Once again, Stallman (will have been) right.

Github/Microsoft is going to take your code, and then cut off your access to it. This is what the GPL was designed to fight, so they're going to try it this way instead.

Those who do not learn history yadda yadda.

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

#125

Post by ghoward »

nlh wrote: post #115

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…

I personally have never heard of TabNine until now. Now that I have, I don't want my code to be part of that.

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

#126

Post by abetusk »

Here is the relevant portion of GitHub's terms of service (section D.4) [0]:

"""

4. License Grant to Us

We need the legal right to do things like host Your Content, publish it, and share it. You grant us and our legal successors the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time. This license includes the right to do things like copy it to our database and make backups; show it to you and other users; parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers; share it with other users; and perform it, in case Your Content is something like music or video.

...

"""

Note that the relevant detail is that this applies to public repositories not covered under some free/libre license. I also assume this excludes private repos which might have more restrictive terms of use. GitHub has a section on it I just haven't read it in detail and so maybe the above covers private repos as well.

[0] https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-o...

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

#127

Post by Lariscus »

nlh wrote: post #115

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…

Yes, and it is also not an OK thing to do for the start-up. They were just lucky that nobody noticed their licence violations.

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

#129

Post by ineedasername »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #117
ineedasername wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are they actually using the source to make a derivative/fork though? If reusing the code in another codebase then definitely attribution would be required. But using it as a dataset seems a bit different-- a grey area. Though I would still agree that the right thing to do would be to have an attribution area, even if it was thousands of entries long. Whether technically required by the license or not, the spirit of these licenses I think would come down on pushing for attribution regardless of the nature of the re-use.

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

#130

Post by yangff »

So.. I can see that this ML model is generating some code exactly same as the original dataset, which definiately a problem. A defect model, sure. Beside that, I cannot understand why the overall idea, using open-source project to train a ML model that generates code would ever be a problem. We human beings are learning as the model, we read others code, books, articles, design patterns... and it becomes part of us. Even the private code, I mean like you join a company, you read their codebase, methodology and it becomes something yours. Copyrights generally not allow you to "copy" the original, but you can still synthesize your own code -- cutting, combination, creating based on whatever you have learnt. The method of how a ML model works is differ from human brain for sure, but I cannot see why this would be a problem, or why an organic would become something superior that what they do is a creation and a ML mode is scraping your code. What is the difference here????

And also recently we saw GPT that generates articles, waifulabs that generates ... waifus... to be honest I cannot perceive the difference since all of them are "learning" (in a mechanical way of human created knowledge.

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