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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

#121

Post by whazor »

I am curious about the results.

Having tested copilot, most suggestions are based on existing code in your opened file. Furthermore, most snippets tend to be relatively short, where it feels more like a Stack Overflow answer than existing code.

Of course it is possible to make the model generate longer pieces of code that are potentially GPL. But you would have to do certain effort for it. It also tends to adopt your coding style.

But maybe the fact that there are no guarantees makes it unfair.

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

#122

Post by nybble41 »

ghoward wrote: post #88
seoaeu wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My licenses say, basically, "Sure, training is fair use, but distributing the output is not." Licenses basically by definition cannot say what is and isn't fair use...

> Licenses basically by definition cannot say what is and isn't fair use... Yes. However, my licenses only say what people already say. Then the licenses go further and say, "But anything else is not allowed." Everyone else says training is fair use. My licenses agree. But they make it clear that I don't believe that anything else is fair use. Yes, these licenses must be tested in court. Except that they poison the w…

It's mildly interesting that you've decided to express your personal opinion about what is or is not fair use within in your license text, but the fact is that if a use of the work is deemed to be fair use under the law then the terms of the license you're offering are completely irrelevant. Your permission is not required to make fair use of the work, so no one needs to agree to your license.

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

#123

Post by fadjacent »

ralph84 wrote: post #76

Their link to why you shouldn't use GitHub[0] takes you to a page where they criticize GitHub for complying with US export controls. The FSF is a US corporation, why do they think that US export controls don't equally apply to savannah.gnu.org? And unlike FSF, GitHub has actually done the work of applying for export licenses so that developers in US-sanctioned countries can access GitHub[1]. [0] https://www.gnu.org/s…

there is a different and more important criticism listed too, githus is nonfree.

But, github could easily establish a non-us entity to host export restricted code. And for savannah, if anyone had any code they were worried about export control for their code, savannah would quickly and easily have an independent person host that repo outside the US.

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

#124

Post by syshum »

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…

Thank you...

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

#125

Post by cromka »

heavyset_go wrote: post #115
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…

> The ignorance in this comment section is already giving me an aneurysm. Software licenses matter. Copyright matters. If anyone thinks they don't, ask why Microsoft didn't train Copilot on their Windows, Office, or Azure source repositories.

Case closed, everybody go home.

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

#126

Post by syshum »

warkdarrior wrote: post #109
hartator wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Software licenses matter. Copyright matters. Some of us think is detrimental to humanity at whole.

If you abolish copyright, that will only make it easier for for-profit corporations to use FOSS. There will be nothing stopping them from using FOSS, unless people stop sharing their code altogether.

While True, if you abolish copyright then there is nothing preventing me from Installing Microsoft office on as many machines as I want never paying Microsoft a dime....

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

#127

Post by syshum »

echelon wrote: post #22
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…

> The ignorance in this comment section is already giving me an aneurysm. For the past ten years we've been spoon fed that it's okay for Open Source / Free Software to be co-opted by giants and subsequently kept private. You'll be harassed for telling people it's wrong for Apple to lock down the iPhone. Or that Google shouldn't be in charge of web standards. Web infrastructure is mostly a bunch of black boxes. How fa…

I learned web development looking at websites code, and open source libraries

Now with JS Obfuscation, and Web Assembly they are attempting to make websites like complied software

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

#128

Post by syshum »

filoleg wrote: post #27
echelon wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The ignorance in this comment section is already giving me an aneurysm. For the past ten years we've been spoon fed that it's okay for Open Source / Free Software to be co-opted by giants and subsequently kept private. You'll be harassed for telling people it's wrong for Apple to lock down the iPhone. Or that Google shouldn't be in charge of web standards. Web infrastructure is mostly a bunch of black boxes. How fa…

> Yes, he did wrong and gross things, but in the same breath he's brushed under the rug, so are his ideas. His ideas being "brushed under the rug" had nothing to do with his public "cancellation" that happened in the past few years. Stallman has always been an extreme purist that prioritized his ideological stance over anything else that matters to users. And his ideas were "brushed under the rug" just as much 5 year…

Stallman was looking out for USERS, not developers. the problem was the developers thought it was them that Stallman was wanting to protect.

GPL, and Libre Software is about keeping software open from the Dev to the EndUser. Non-Copyleft "Open Source" is about keeping libraries open for Dev's to exploit into their closed source products...

There is a big difference, I support Free Software, not "Open Source"

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

#129

Post by phillipcarter »

c7DJTLrn wrote: post #70
lamontcg wrote: post #65

Given how the racist twitterbot AI turned out, along with L4 autonomous driving by 2017, I suspect that Copilot is going to suffer most from an incredibly high velocity of churned out security bugs and bad code. SWEs are probably going to get fired for using it and companies will need to ban it, even if the legal problems don't take it down.

It's useless. It is a problem looking for a solution much like most "AI" tools these days. I am frankly frustrated at everyone buying into this stunt.

I don't think Copilot is useless at all. Today it's actually been very helpful for me with interactive, notebooks-based programming. And it's also just an early beta right now; as the model improves and the tooling around it matures a little more, I suspect I'll be using it a lot for interactive stuff.

Notebooks programming has a flow of "execute a small bit of code, check the results, and iterate", and this fits perfectly with Copilot since you still need to check if the suggestions work.

Maybe this kind of programming is where Copilot finds a niche, maybe not. I don't know. I'm skeptical of its use in larger applications where you can't trivially check if the code you wrote (with its help) did what you want. I think there needs to be a lot more tooling built around that to really make it compelling for larger applications like that, likely in the form of more editor tooling integrations. But I think it's promising. I wrote about that a little more here: https://phillipcarter.dev/posts/four-dev-tools-areas-future/...

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

#130

Post by ghoward »

nybble41 wrote: post #122
ghoward wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Licenses basically by definition cannot say what is and isn't fair use... Yes. However, my licenses only say what people already say. Then the licenses go further and say, "But anything else is not allowed." Everyone else says training is fair use. My licenses agree. But they make it clear that I don't believe that anything else is fair use. Yes, these licenses must be tested in court. Except that they poison the w…

It's mildly interesting that you've decided to express your personal opinion about what is or is not fair use within in your license text, but the fact is that if a use of the work is deemed to be fair use under the law then the terms of the license you're offering are completely irrelevant. Your permission is not required to make fair use of the work, so no one needs to agree to your license.

> It's mildly interesting that you've decided to express your personal opinion about what is or is not fair use within in your license text, but the fact is that if a use of the work is deemed to be fair use under the law then the terms of the license you're offering are completely irrelevant. Your permission is not required to make fair use of the work, so no one needs to agree to your license.

You do not seem to get it. Yes, I understand that if fair use applies, my licenses don't matter. I get that. I promise I do get that.

The purpose of these licenses is to sow doubt that fair use applies to distributing the output of ML models.

Lawyers are usually a cautious lot. If a legal question has not been answered, they usually want to stay away from any possibility of legal risk regarding that question.

The licenses create a question: does fair use apply to the output of ML algorithms? With that question not answered, lawyers and their companies might elect to stay away from ML models trained with my code, and ML companies might stay away from training ML models on my code in the first place.

That is what I mean by "poisoning the well." The poison is doubt about the legality of distributing the output of ML models, and it is meant to put a damper on enthusiasm for code being used to train ML models, especially for my code.

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