Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 212 posts

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

#131

Post by jchw »

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…

GitHub has more visibility and yes, more scrutiny. But that doesn’t mean TabNine would’ve survived without scrutiny, especially after an acquisition. The fact is, size matters.

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

#132

Post by rdw »

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…

The feature of TabNine that uses the "public" dataset is optional. It can also provide completions only based on local code. That optionality is important.

Also, tabnine has a smaller scope; you type "var " and it suggests a variable name and possibly the rest of the line, like autocomplete has been doing for decades. Perfectly normal.

My understanding of copilot is that you can type "// here's a high-level description of my problem" and it'll fill out entire functions, dozens of lines. The scope is much grander.

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

#133

Post by jefftk »

jrm4 wrote: post #124
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.

How does this cut off our access to the code?

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

#134

Post by Engineering-MD »

oaiey wrote: post #118
Engineering-MD wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nov…

It was a bit of a tongue in cheek comment. It’s very unlikely they were even planning this when they bought GitHub. While you’re completely right about their rationale, a lot of people were at the time concerned about the acquisition, and it feels now a bit short sighted to burn all the good will they have generated by an act like this which undermines open source.

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

#136

Post by jefftk »

jeroenhd wrote: post #69
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)

Open source code still has a license. That license may or may not require distributing the license along with the code. MIT may allow distribution without a license unless the code share is significant, but reusing GPL3 is a no-go for commercial companies. The Apache 2 license allows for commercial use, but has implications for the way you can enforce your software patents. It also requires distributing the license f…

> reusing GPL3 is a no-go for commercial companies

The GPL is completely compatible with commercial use. You just need to share modifications to the source with anyone you share the binary with. Many tech companies make extensive use of GPL software, and since they are not providing binaries to their end users they don't even have to share their changes to the source.

Even the AGPL, which does require you to share the source with users, still completely allows commercial use (though not compatible with as many business models).

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

#137

Post by randallsquared »

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…

Yeah, and https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-o... has this language:

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.

This license does not grant GitHub the right to sell Your Content. [...]

So, it's not clear if they could charge for Copilot, given that last line, but indexing, analysis, and sharing with other users are all included.

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

#138

Post by [deleted] »

zmmmmm wrote: post #120
pessimizer wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

[deleted]

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

#139

Post by yayr »

To me it seems, the whole subject requires additional consideration in licensing. It is a little like applying telephone based law to the internet. It will not 100% fit.

If the creators interests are not clearly expressed anymore with a license, we need updates to the license texts.

Let's look at MIT:

____________________

"Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. [...]

____________________

From the license text alone, it would not be clear to me, why anyone could claim that the OpenAI codex or the Github Copilot would require attribution to any of the used MIT source code to generate the AI model. The AI model is simply not a copy of the source or of a portion thereof. It is essentially a mathematical / statistical analysis of it.

Now what about any generated new source? How similar does it need to be to any source to be a copy? At what size of the generated code it qualifies to be a copy instead of a snippet of industry best practice?

Where does the responsibility for attribution lie? Should we treat the AI code generation models like a copy & paste program? Usually you cannot really say where the copy came from 100% - how do you know what factors influenced it?

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

#140

Post by ineedasername »

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.

My non-expert reading of the AGPL seems to indicate that using AGPL code in a commercial project is find as long as you don't change it. GitHub wouldn't necessarily have needed to change it to include it in a data set, so I'm not sure there's a license violation.

However the gray area is that the massive data set of which it is a part will spit out new code that has, in some way big or small, been influence by the AGPL code, which... well, I don't think that sort of use was anticipated by the terms of AGPL. I see can reasonable arguments in both directions. Personally though, I would favor an interpretation that limits GitHub's use for commercial purposes, if not for strictly licensing restrictions then at least for the spirit of these licenses.

In truth, I would very much have liked GitHub to gone out big & loud with an aggressive awareness campaign asking repo owner to opt-in to the use of their code for this. Again, for pure opens source licenses I don't thing that would be required, but I still think it would be the right thing to do. And certainly less damaging to their reputation & future hesitancy for project maintainers to trust GitHub with their code.

I don't think this will be a tipping point by itself, but if this behavioral pattern continues I could imagine devs big & small shifting to hosted or on-prem instances of things like GitLab.

Post reply on HN